Welcome to StackScout
What is StackScout?
StackScout is an infrastructure monitoring and alerting platform. It allows you to view the resource usage of the servers you manage, (such as CPU, memory, disk space, network I/O, and more) and to set up alert policies that will send you a notification based on the conditions that you defined. Example: StackScout can send you a text message if any of your servers exceed the 80% of memory usage or 70% of CPU usage.
How does it work?
In order to start using StackScout, assuming you've created a new account already, you will need to install a monitoring agent on the servers that you wish to monitor. Monitoring agent is a small program that runs in the background and sends telemetry data (resource usage measurements) to StackScout. The monitoring agent can be installed automatically, or if you can install it yourself directly on the server using a terminal. You can read the setup the instructions articles in the knowledge base here.
Once the monitoring agent daemon is up and running on your machines (such as dedicated or virtual servers, macOS or Linux personal computers, or even small single-board computers like Raspberry Pi!) you can view the real-time data on the server list page, or you can click into a particular machine to see even more details.
In addition, you can set up alert policies that will notify you automatically if there's anything wrong with any of your machines, based on the conditions that you define. First head over to Notification Channels page and set up channels that you wish to be notified on. We currently support email, SMS, webhook, Slack and PagerDuty notifications. Click here to learn more about creating a new notification channel.
Once you have one or more notification channels set up, you can create a new alert policy. An alert policy is a set of rules and conditions, as well as target notification channels that will be used to deliver the alert. Check out the alert policy feature documentation for more details. Alert policies are very powerful, you can select specific machines or tags to monitor, or define additional rules about when the policy should expire, whether it should automatically close the incidents after a specific amount of time, or if there should be a cooldown period before a new alert policy for the same server could be opened again.
If an alert policy conditions are breached, StackScout will open an incident. Incidents are a way of tracking what happened, to which server and provide a timeline of events that happened over the course of time while the incident was open.
Finally, StackScout provides you with several high-level reports about your infrastructure, such as a customizable health map, and downtime report. You can access the reports from the left hand side menu.
You can read more about reporting and analytics on the Reports & analytics page in this knowledge base.