What is Vigil and who built it?

Vigil is an open-source monitoring tool built in Rust by Valerian Saliou at Crisp (crisp.chat). It was created to monitor Crisp's microservice architecture in production and has been battle-tested since 2018.

How does Vigil compare to PingZen?

Vigil excels at microservice monitoring with three monitoring modes (polling, app reporting, daemon) and is extremely lightweight due to Rust. PingZen offers 22 protocols, requires no setup, monitors from global locations, and includes incident management.

Does Vigil support application health reporting?

Yes, Vigil has a unique feature where your applications can report their health status directly to Vigil via an HTTP endpoint. This is useful for detecting issues that external polling cannot catch, like database connection problems or degraded performance.

Is Vigil good for production use?

Yes, Vigil has been used in production at Crisp.chat since 2018, monitoring their entire microservice infrastructure. Being written in Rust, it is extremely stable and memory-efficient.

PingZen vs Vigil: Cloud SaaS vs Rust-Based Microservice Monitor

Vigil is an open-source microservices monitoring tool written in Rust by the Crisp team. It supports three monitoring modes: HTTP/TCP/ICMP polling, application-level health reporting, and local daemon monitoring. Built for production at Crisp.chat, it offers a clean status page with maintenance announcements and alerts via 12+ channels including Telegram, Slack, and Matrix.

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Quick Comparison

Best Value

PingZen

Price: Free forever
Intervals: 30 seconds
Protocols: 22 protocols
Alerts: 12+ channels

Vigil

Price: Free (self-hosted)
Intervals: Configurable (any)
Protocols: 5 (HTTP, TCP, SSH, ICMP, RabbitMQ)
Alerts: 12+ channels

Feature Comparison

Feature Comparison
Feature	PingZen	Vigil
HTTP/HTTPS monitoring
TCP port monitoring
Ping (ICMP)
SSH monitoring
RabbitMQ monitoring
DNS monitoring
SSL certificate monitoring
WebSocket monitoring
gRPC monitoring
WHOIS/Domain expiry
Application health reporting Apps report health to Vigil
Local daemon monitoring System-level process checks
Maintenance announcements
Telegram alerts
Slack integration
Matrix alerts
XMPP alerts
Status page
No server required
Open source

Why Choose PingZen

22 protocols vs 5 — DNS, SSL, WebSocket, gRPC, SMTP, WHOIS, and more
Zero setup — no Rust toolchain, Docker, or TOML configuration
Global monitoring from multiple datacenter locations
Team workspaces with collaboration and role-based access
Incident management with timeline and stakeholder updates
Web dashboard with historical data and response time graphs

When Vigil is Better

Written in Rust — extremely memory-safe and crash-resistant
Three monitoring modes: polling, app reporting, and daemon checks
Application-level health reporting (apps push status to Vigil)
RabbitMQ queue monitoring built-in
SSH connectivity monitoring
Matrix and XMPP alert channels for self-hosted chat users

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Migration Tip

Use PingZen for external monitoring (HTTP, SSL, DNS, WebSocket, gRPC) and keep Vigil for internal microservice health reporting where applications push their status. This combination covers both external availability and internal service health.