I built a Telegram bot that works fine 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 still active and working properly.
I was thinking about setting up some kind of health check system. Maybe I could send test messages to the bot from a different server and see if it responds within a certain time limit. If there’s no response after a few seconds, then I know something is wrong with the bot.
The problem is I’m not sure how to implement this monitoring system. Do I need to install a Telegram client on my monitoring server? Or is there a simpler way to ping the bot and check its status?
Has anyone dealt with this kind of bot monitoring before? What approach did you use to make sure your bot stays responsive?
I’ve been running Telegram bots for years and external monitoring plus internal logging is the way to go. I set up a separate monitoring bot that pings my main bot every 10-15 minutes during busy hours. The main bot has a handler just for these test messages - it responds instantly without messing with real users. If my monitoring script doesn’t hear back within 30 seconds, it fires off an alert and can auto-restart the bot. This setup caught tons of issues where the bot looked fine but had actually lost connection to Telegram’s servers. You’ll need python-telegram-bot for the monitoring client, but it’s easy to set up. Just make sure you filter out the test messages from your analytics so they don’t mess with your real user data.
Had the same problem with my bot randomly going silent. Here’s what fixed it for me: I set up a simple health check endpoint alongside my Telegram webhook. My monitoring service pings it every few minutes expecting a 200 response. If it doesn’t respond, the whole app probably crashed or froze. For Telegram stuff specifically, I log when the last message came in - either to a database or just a file. Then I’ve got a cron job that checks if that timestamp is too old based on how busy my bot usually is. Way better than creating extra Telegram clients or sending test messages that’ll confuse actual users. Using both methods covers all the bases. The health endpoint catches crashes, and the timestamp check catches when the app’s running but somehow not processing Telegram updates.
u could try using UptimeRobot or other similar services to ping your bot’s webhook url. lots of hosting platforms have health checks built in too. i made a simple /status command that shows uptime and last activity - super handy for quick manual checks when something feels off.