Data Dog - 'top dog' in monitoring

Now that I have my home network setup as I would like, I've begun to add another layer, monitoring. Previously I've had issues with my Raspberry Pi locking up and going down, with me none the wiser. I needed some way to be notified with the Pi goes down so that I can bring things back up, since this device is my Pi-hole ad blocker and Unifi controller. The solution: Data Dog.

Data Dog (www.datadog.com) allows for remote logging to keep tabs on all types of usage stats for all of your devices. I started with just my Raspberry Pi, and it allows for historical charts of these common stats. The most useful feature I've found though, is alerts. I can set thresholds for when email alerts will be dispatched. For instance, I setup an alert so that after 60 seconds, if Data Dog has not received an update from my Raspberry Pi, an email is automatically sent to me that my Pi is DOWN. From this point, I can log in and diagnose my problem, which will (hopefully) result in another email letting me know the DOWN state has been resolved.

My plan is to add remote logging for all of my Unifi devices, but for now, I am just monitoring my Pi. Once I add logging to everything else I will write a follow up post highlighting these steps.