LastPing

Most monitoring watches a thing and tells you when it looks wrong. LastPing waits for a thing to check in and tells you when it doesn't. That inversion is the whole product: a job that breaks can't send you an error, but it can fail to send you anything — and absence is the one signal a broken process can still produce.

This repository holds the open-source pieces: the lastping CLI and the MCP server. The hosted service they talk to is at lastping.dev, free for individuals.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tp322d/lastping-app/main/install.sh | sh

No Go toolchain needed — that pulls a prebuilt binary for macOS and Linux, on amd64 and arm64, and verifies its checksum. Windows builds are on the releases page.

If you do have Go:

go install github.com/tp322d/lastping-app/cmd/lastping@latest

lastping run — reporting you can't forget

Put it in front of whatever you already run:

lastping run --monitor <monitor-id> -- python nightly_etl.py
lastping run --monitor <monitor-id> -- ./backup.sh
lastping run --monitor <monitor-id> -- claude

It sends a start ping, runs your command untouched, and reports the exit code when it finishes — success on 0, failure on anything else, with the tail of stderr attached so the alert says why.

Three properties worth knowing, because they are the difference between a monitoring wrapper you can trust in production and one you remove after a bad night:

• Your exit code always propagates. The wrapper exits with whatever your command exited with, so CI behaves exactly as it did before you added it.
• A failed ping never touches your command. If LastPing is unreachable, your job still runs, still writes its output, still exits normally.
• Interactive stays interactive. stdin and stdout are handed over as file descriptors, so wrapping a REPL or an agent session works.

Why a wrapper rather than an instruction? Because anything advisory decays. An AI agent told to report on every task will stop doing it, and a cron line you meant to add a curl to never gets it. A wrapper reports from the process lifecycle, so nothing depends on anybody remembering.

MCP server — let an agent set up its own monitoring

// claude_desktop_config.json, .mcp.json, or your client's equivalent
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lastping": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://mcp.lastping.dev/mcp",
               "--header", "Authorization: Bearer ${LASTPING_API_KEY}"],
      "env": { "LASTPING_API_KEY": "lp__your_key_here" }
    }
  }
}

The hosted server is the recommended path — nothing to install, and it always carries the current tool set.

A stdio binary is also here if you would rather run it yourself:

go install github.com/tp322d/lastping-app/cmd/lastping-mcp@latest

The one that matters most is get_ping_instructions: an agent calls create_monitor, then asks for its own ping commands, and wires them into its own work — in one conversation, without a human opening a dashboard.

Ping API

Every monitor gets a URL. There is nothing to install and no library to keep current; anything that can make an HTTP request can report.

Add ?rid=<id> to pair a run's start with its result, so LastPing can group a run's pings and time it.

# The classic one-liner, at the end of a cron job:
curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://ping.lastping.dev/<monitor-id>

Monitoring as code

resource "lastping_monitor" "nightly_etl" {
  name          = "nightly-etl"
  slug          = "nightly-etl"
  schedule_kind = "cron"
  cron_expr     = "0 3 * * *"
  tz            = "Europe/Berlin"
  grace_s       = 900
}

The provider is on the Terraform Registry as lastping-dev/lastping, with source at lastping-dev/terraform-provider-lastping.

Links

• lastping.dev — the hosted service, free for individuals
• AI agent monitoring — the agent-first guide
• MCP server — connect configs per client
• Terraform provider — monitoring as code
• Integration guides — cron, Kubernetes, systemd, GitHub Actions, Python, Node

License

MIT. See LICENSE.