In the high-stakes world of web operations, downtime is the ultimate enemy. During the AIORI-2 Hackathon, team Ping Bot from ACE Engineering College developed a Website Health Monitor designed to move beyond simple “up/down” checks. Built on the Django framework, the system provides a deep-dive analysis of website vitality by strictly adhering to the “rules of the road” defined by the IETF.
By aligning their monitoring logic with RFC 9110 (HTTP Semantics) and RFC 1035 (DNS), the team ensured that their health checks aren’t just guesses—they are standardized validations of a site’s technical integrity.
1. The Architecture of Reliability
The Ping Bot system functions as a digital sentry, standing over web endpoints and verifying every layer of the connection. The architecture is built to be modular, allowing for easy integration into larger enterprise environments.
- Monitoring Engine: A Django-based core that utilizes Celery for asynchronous, scheduled task management. This prevents the monitoring process from being “blocked” when checking hundreds of endpoints.
- The Validation Stack:
- HTTP Layer (RFC 9110): Validates status codes, ensuring that a “200 OK” truly means the content is served correctly.
- DNS Layer (RFC 1035): Verifies that domain resolution is pointing to the correct, reachable IP addresses.
- Secure Transport (RFC 5246/8446): Performs TLS handshake checks to warn administrators before a certificate expires.
2. Multichannel Alerting: Beating the Silence
A monitor is only as effective as its ability to wake up a developer at 3:00 AM. Team Ping Bot implemented a robust alerting framework that bridges several communication protocols:
- Email (JMAP/RFC 8620): High-detail reports sent via structured mail protocols.
- Webhooks: Instantly pushes data to third-party services like Slack or custom internal dashboards.
- Telegram API: Real-time mobile notifications for immediate on-the-go awareness.
3. Key Metrics & Compliance Findings
The team didn’t just build a tool; they ran it through a gauntlet of interoperability tests to ensure it spoke “perfect” HTTP.
| Metric | Value | Technical Observation |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime Accuracy | 99.5% | Stable monitoring across 20 global endpoints. |
| Alert Latency | < 2s | Asynchronous Celery tasks ensured near-instant dispatch. |
| RFC Compliance | 100% | Verified via HTTPBIS test cases for header parsing. |
| Median Latency | Variable | Thresholding was used to filter out “false-positive” transient spikes. |
4. Lessons from the Field: Solving False Positives
One of the team’s biggest hurdles was dealing with “transient outages”—moments where a site appears down for a fraction of a second due to network jitter.
“We learned that raw data can be deceptive. By introducing median latency thresholding and retry logic, we reduced ‘noise’ in our alerts, ensuring that when an alarm goes off, it’s for a real problem.” — B. Sai Mani Chandra, Team Lead
5. Open-Source Impact
The project isn’t just a private tool; it’s a contribution to the community.
- Django-Alert Middleware: A reusable component for other Django developers to add uptime monitoring to their projects.
- IETF Feedback: Observations on HTTP metrics were shared with the HTTPBIS and OPSAREA Working Groups to inform future operational standards.
6. Future Work: The Road to QUIC
The team isn’t stopping at traditional web protocols. Their roadmap for 2026 includes:
- QUIC-based Health Checks: Monitoring the next generation of transport (RFC 9000).
- Web Socket Alerts: For real-time, bi-directional monitoring dashboards.
- DDoS Pattern Recognition: Identifying if “downtime” is actually a concentrated network attack.
