a hack I'm proud of: free server/application monitoring by (ab)using Google Sheets
I recently launched Opsgrid, which I built after getting fed up with expensive server monitoring products. It costs next to nothing to run while still supporting unlimited hosts, custom alerting, and about a year of data retention.
The trick: it doesn't actually store metric data. Instead, it transforms metrics to rows and pushes them to Google Sheets. I also made use of Telegraf to avoid building a metric agent.
Behind the scenes it's a Django app for the site plus a node service that handles metrics and Sheets interactions. It's not open source yet because the node side is a mess, due to an initial attempt to support self-hosting on Apps Script. I got it working out of spite - did you know Apps Script has lambda + dynamo equivalents? - but distribution through Google's platform was pretty much impossible. Apps Script also didn't support ES6 at the time and used a different Sheets client library, so I had some kludgy transpilation to allow one codebase to work under both environments.
What do you think? I'm also considering supporting cron monitoring (ala
Dead Man's Snitch), but that hasn't been much of a pain point for me.
I actually develop on the gsuite quite often. Their quotas are pretty generous. They don't charge you for spreadsheet storage and It's amazing how you essentially have unlimited RAM to do calculations in memory.
Interesting, can you face rate limits by Google though (how many times you can push per hour?)
Yup. They're pretty generous, though. Right now I'm at around 10k reqs / day for each of Drive queries, Sheets reads, and Sheets writes. Daily requests are more or less unlimited (1,000,000,000 / day for Drive, unlimited for Sheets) so I really only have to worry about the 500 reqs / 100 seconds limits on Sheets. I'm at ~7 / 100s on average right now without any caching or batching of requests.
Supposedly you can request quota increases too, but I have no idea if that actually works in practice.