monitoring pfsense with uptimerobot
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I want to create a "dumb" port, that goes nowhere but keeps listening on specific port. Afterwards i would set up "uptimerobot" to check this port and will know when pfsense is online, when in goes offline.
Could somebody help me with this? I've tried to make using chatgpt, tried some of suggestions but it did not worked out.
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@pfsense57352 why would you not just ping it?
I have had monitor on uptime robot for years and years
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@johnpoz I have done something similar, although maybe being paranoid I didn’t want to open my firewall up to the world. As an FYI uptimerobot have text files with their IP ranges, so you can use that as an alias, and just allow pings from one of their IP addresses
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@TravisH said in monitoring pfsense with uptimerobot:
I didn’t want to open my firewall up to the world.
Why to the world ?
I use the (now ancient, I admit) munin to collect loads of info about my pfSense, and my Munin runs on some server somewhere on the Internet :
It accesses my pfSense like this :
where SYS is the IP of my server.
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I found the solution. This is nice, as you can whitelist IP's and pfsense will not respond to ping's other than uptimerobot ip's.
Take a look at this:
https://blog.chriscarini.com/2021/04/external-monitoring-of-pfsense-with.html
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@pfsense57352 said in monitoring pfsense with uptimerobot:
you can whitelist IP's
As I've said : create an firewall Alias (mine is called 'SYS') and fill it up with allowed IPs.
Use this alias as a Source and you're good. -
@TravisH yeah I have aliases that allow access to different things.. I allow the ips from status cake, uptime robot, plex check, etc.
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@Gertjan I have done something similar with aliases. I wanted to be able to access some services from work and through Cloudflare proxy but not the wider internet, so added this in an alias, works well. Looks like they got the uptime robot stuff worked out :).
It’s a handy tool if you don’t have a server somewhere else and just want a simple ping test, I use it for all my work internet connections lol, so if someone says hey the phones are down (IP phones), I know right away it’s the internet or not lol.
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I was looking to do something similar — basically keep a “dumb” port open so I could monitor when my pfSense is online or goes down. I found a simple solution that worked for me without needing to open the firewall or mess with exceptions.
What I did was just forward a random, unused port on my router to pfSense (doesn't need to serve any real service). Then, I used a service like Host-Tracker's port check https://www.host-tracker.com/en/ic/port-check to monitor it externally. It pings the port at intervals and alerts me if it goes offline. Super easy to set up, and it gives me the uptime info I need without exposing anything sensitive. Hope it helps!
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@pfsense57352 I am new to pfsense and It might seem a bit overkill to install Home Assistant just to monitor pfsense, but the built in integration is really nice and I don't know your use case.
It even has an addon that runs locally called Uptime Kuma (basically an uptimerobot alternative).
The ha pfsense addon has a lot of sensors... just fyi here is a home assistant page where I get info from pfsense:
