I’ve created a Telegram bot that works most of the time, but sometimes it stops responding to user messages and seems to freeze up. I need to find a way to automatically monitor whether my bot is working correctly.
I’m thinking about setting up some kind of health check system that runs from a different server. My idea is to create a monitoring process that sends test messages to the bot and waits for responses. If the bot doesn’t reply within a certain timeframe, I’ll know something is wrong.
The challenge is that I would need to set up a Telegram client on my monitoring server to send these test messages. I’m running Linux and wondering if there are better approaches to solve this problem.
Has anyone dealt with similar bot monitoring issues? What methods work best for checking if a Telegram bot is still alive and responding?
Had the exact same problem with my trading bot last year. I fixed it with a heartbeat system using a simple database table or text file. The bot updates a timestamp every time it processes a message or runs its main function. Then I’ve got a separate monitoring script checking this timestamp every 5 minutes. If it hasn’t updated within the expected time, the monitor kills the bot and restarts it automatically. This catches both complete crashes and when the bot looks like it’s running but actually stopped processing messages. Way more reliable than external ping methods since it monitors the bot’s actual functionality, not just connectivity.
I run several Telegram bots and internal health endpoints work way better than external monitoring. I add a simple HTTP server inside the bot app that responds to health checks on a specific port. The endpoint checks if the main loop’s running and the Telegram API connection’s active. For monitoring, I use a basic cron job that pings this health endpoint every few minutes. No response or error status? It automatically restarts the bot service. Way simpler than setting up a separate Telegram client for testing. Also helped to add proper logging to figure out why the bot freezes. Usually it’s memory leaks or unhandled exceptions causing the hanging.
just use systemd if you’re on linux. set up your bot as a service with restart policies - it’ll handle crashes automatically. add a webhook health check where telegram pings your bot’s url every few mins. if it fails, you know something’s broken. way easier than building custom monitoring.