We ran across a very creative use of Pingdom monitoring the other day. Most people use Pingdom to monitor the status of websites and servers, but Eric Nagel uses our monitoring service to keep track of the temperature in his outdoor hot tub (complete with rubber ducky).
How does he do it? He uses a wireless temperature sensor (seen bottom right in the picture below) that he checks the status of via his own server. A small script generates an online status page that contains either “OK” or “Too cold.” This status page is monitored with Pingdom, so Eric will get an alert via SMS if his hot tub is too cold.
Photo by Eric Nagel. (Thanks, Eric!)
Nifty, isn’t it? To see exactly how he set things up, head over to Eric’s blog.
It’s official. You can monitor ANYTHING with Pingdom. 🙂
(If you’re using the Pingdom monitoring service in unusual ways, don’t hesitate to let us know. We love this kind of stuff! Who knows, we may even write a blog post about it…)
