My 5p worth as a long time hard core geek and developer....
For me this is a non-question. There is an API already, on
https://panel.bitfolk.com/xfer/ albeit in html.
To do an http request with authorisation and filter out the correct information is barely any more work than implement any other API call into your current system.
Alternatively, have a rule for incoming emails that sends you an alert. (How? Email? ;-) )
Trying to not sound rude, but everything is there, just not in your flavour of ice cream. For Andy to implement anything else would just create redundant functionality, and you surely would have to create a similar customisation at your end as with what is already there. The web server(s) behind the panel surely wouldn't notice another call ever fifth minute.
As for the courtesy email, that is my only monitoring of bandwidth usage. my machines rarely even hit 1 GB transfer per month, so I don't see the need for it. I blindly trust Andy and BitFolk to keep an eye on that for me. Probably not very polite of me. Do have other systems set up for monitoring and protecting against an attack, but bandwidth is not something I pay attention to there. Maybe I should, but so far I haven't seen the need for it. I check the usage email when it comes in and if it looks wrong I look in to it. This has happened once, and the usage was maybe 5GB instead of 1.
Kindest regards,
__
/ony
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Thursday, February 24, 2022, 12:09:44 AM, Andy wrote:
> Hi Roger,
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 11:37:40PM +0000, Roger Light wrote:
>> On Wed, 23 Feb 2022 at 20:51, Andy Smith <andy@???> wrote:
>>
>> > - The rare times that people do go over their quota they tend to
>> > focus on BitFolk's measurements of this instead of looking into
>> > the behaviour of their own VM. I feel like anything I implement is
>> > just going to be a further distraction from the customer's own
>> > responsibilities.
>>
>> This matches my experience. I pay reasonable attention to the quota
>> emails but don't do any monitoring myself because I don't expect to be
>> at any risk of going over the quota. From a customer perspective
>> though, I expect the measurements made by bitfolk to be the gold
>> standard in terms of billing so my measurements would ultimately be
>> secondary.
> It reads like you actually don't agree with me. What I was trying to
> say was that I expect customers to actually be able to measure
> their own bandwidth usage, and BitFolk telling them that they are
> near or over quota is just a courtesy.
> What you are saying is that you don't expect to have to measure
> this yourself, you would never be aware of it or investigate it
> without a notification from BitFolk and therefore these
> notifications are essential to you. You did get the notification and
> were able to take action, but only because email notifications
> are satisfactory for you.
> If most people are the same then this means that receiving and being
> able to act upon these notifications isn't just a courtesy, it is
> essential. The fact that you were able to is great, but the fact
> that others aren't is of concern to me.
> Conrad was saying that they do have their own monitoring but that
> the email notifications and the figures on the panel web page aren't
> satisfactory because they are hard to be aware of (emails get
> overlooked) and don't provide easy spot checks.
> Is there any middle ground that could improve things for you,
> Conrad, without me having to make an HTTP endpoint that gives these
> figures?
> For example, I could probably plug it in to our Icinga monitoring¹
> so that it continually gave you a WARNING email when predicted to
> exceed, turning into a CRITICAL when it actually has. Besides email,
> our Icinga can also do Pushover² alerts, and I am open to adding
> more kinds of alerts there.
> Even if that does not work for Conrad, it might be a better
> interface for more people so I would be interested in feed back on
> that or other ideas.
> One of my big problems with the API thing is that I feel like it
> will have a very limited audience, very likely at this point to be
> only Conrad. I currently manage four Linodes for various reasons and
> although Linode has an API I've never felt a need to use it myself.
> I monitor my own bandwidth usage. I do often find myself at odds
> with others though.
> Cheers,
> Andy
> ¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Monitoring
> ² https://pushover.net/
