Orbis Monitoring

Why Orbis Monitoring?

You already keep your clients, projects and subscriptions in Orbis. Why keep your uptime monitoring in yet another SaaS dashboard?

Orbis Monitoring turns any URL into a monitor, a regular WordPress post that lives next to the rest of your work. Every minute it checks whether the site responds the way it should. If something is off, your team hears about it in Slack right away.

No external service. No monthly fee per monitor. Your data stays on your own server.

✨ Features

🔄 How it works

flowchart LR
    A[⏱️ Every minute] --> B[Queue a check<br/>per monitor]
    B --> C[🌐 Request URL]
    C --> D[(💾 Store response<br/>& timing)]
    D --> E{Expected status<br/>and location?}
    E -- ✅ yes --> F{Was it offline?}
    F -- yes --> G[orbis_monitoring_incident_resolved]
    E -- ❌ no --> H{Failed checks in a row<br/>reached threshold?}
    H -- no --> I[🟠 Pending]
    H -- yes, first time --> J[orbis_monitoring_incident_opened]
    G --> K[🔔 Slack alert]
    J --> K

1. Add a monitor: give it a title and a URL, and optionally the status code and redirect location you expect.
2. Sit back: Action Scheduler queues one check per monitor every minute. Checks are unique per monitor, so a slow site never piles up a backlog.
3. Get notified: when the response doesn't match a number of times in a row, an incident is opened, the orbis_monitoring_incident_opened action fires and your team gets one Slack message. When it recovers, the incident is resolved and orbis_monitoring_incident_resolved fires. The threshold and an optional reminder interval are set under Settings → Orbis Monitoring.
4. Dig in: open the monitor to see its status, incident history, response history and response time graph.

Tip

Redirects are not followed. That's on purpose: it lets you check that http:// sends visitors to https://, or that an old domain still redirects to the right place.

📦 Installation

Requirements: WordPress 7.1+, PHP 8.3+ and an Orbis environment.

1. Download the latest release, or build it yourself (see Development).
2. Upload the orbis-monitoring folder to wp-content/plugins/.
3. Activate Orbis Monitoring in WordPress.
4. Go to Monitors → Add New and add your first site. 🎉

Server cron

By default Action Scheduler runs its queue on WP-Cron, which only fires when someone visits the site. For checks that really run every minute, let the server run the queue with WP-CLI. All actions of this plugin are in the orbis-monitoring group, so you can run just those:

* * * * * wp action-scheduler run --group=orbis-monitoring --batch-size=500 --batches=1 --path=/path/to/wordpress --quiet

• --group=orbis-monitoring only runs the actions of Orbis Monitoring, so other plugins can't slow down the checks.
• --batch-size=500 --batches=1 runs up to 500 actions per minute. Each published monitor adds one check per minute, so keep the batch size above the number of monitors.
• --quiet keeps the output out of your cron mail. Errors are still sent.

Each published monitor adds an action every minute, so Orbis Monitoring tunes Action Scheduler for a high volume of actions:

With only one concurrent batch, the server cron fails with Error: There are too many concurrent batches. whenever WP-Cron or another plugin is already processing its queue.

Tip

Also run the queue of other plugins with a separate cron line without --group, or keep WP-Cron enabled for them.

Slack alerts

Install the Slack plugin and add an integration. Orbis Monitoring adds three events you can choose from:

• When a monitor detects an outage: once, when the monitored URL goes offline.
• When a monitor detects that an outage continues (reminder): only when a reminder interval is set.
• When a monitor detects a recovery: once, when the monitored URL is back online, with the duration of the outage.

Note

Earlier versions had Slack events that fired for every check. These events are removed, so select the new events in your Slack integration after updating.

🧩 For developers

Orbis Monitoring is built to be extended. Hook into the checks to send alerts anywhere you like:

add_action(
	'orbis_monitoring_incident_opened',
	function ( WP_Post $post, array|WP_Error $response, object $incident ): void {
		$url = get_post_meta( $post->ID, '_orbis_monitor_url', true );

		// Create a ticket, send an SMS, page the on-call engineer…
	},
	10,
	3
);

Want a different look? Add an archive-orbis_monitor.php to your theme and it is used instead of the template in this plugin.

🧰 Development

composer install
npm install

Local environment (wp-env)

npx wp-env start
npx wp-env stop

The .wp-env.json maps the plugin twice into the WordPress environment:

Run composer run build to create the build version.

Useful commands

Housekeeping

Monitoring every minute adds up: with 350 monitors that is over 500,000 responses a day. Orbis Monitoring keeps the database lean with two Action Scheduler jobs in the orbis-monitoring group:

The response retention period defaults to 30 days and can be changed under Settings → Orbis Monitoring → Data. The hourly summaries are kept indefinitely.

The summaries can also be managed with WP-CLI:

📄 License

Orbis Monitoring is free software, licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later.