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Web Site Monitoring Services?
Napoleon Solo asks: "Unfortunately, it seems like most web hosts still don't do a good job of monitoring whether a server is up or not, especially for dedicated servers. It seems like an off-network monitoring service is a good idea if you want to know when your site goes down. (After all, it's not like your host will tell you). What monitoring services (preferably free) do Slashdot readers like? I'm familiar with QWK.Mon, NetWhistle, and NetMechanic. (Although neither of the latter two offer free service any more) are there any others?"
This doesn't really answer his question, and I don't mean to pick on this post, since most of the posts here are telling how to locally monitor servers, and every good aadmin knows that it's not the local server connection you care about, but the external connection
That being said, Big Brother is a very good program for internal monitoring of just about anything you can think of. There's scripts for most things, and if there isn't, and you can figure out how to script it, there's an "API" for throwing events to the BBDISPLAY host. Full paging/notification capabilities, even to the point of different methods based on what event and what time it is (Email everyone all the time, page oncall if it's between 6 PM and 7 AM, etc). I've used it at multiple places, and just recently set it up at home (Of course, Apache is being a bitch and not authing me through to see it...oh well). For a small-to-mid sized shop that doesn't want to spend the $$$ on something like Tivoli or Unicenter, and doesn't need full interactivity and auto-discovery and all that crap, BB will do good for ya.
The web page for Big Brother is here
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I posted this thought as a reply down lower, but it'll get lost.
Running a program on your network to tell you if your web server goes down is worth exactly zero. If your net connection goes down, your web server is still up, it's just not reachable by the rest of the world. In the end, you could care less if your local connection dies, as long as people out in the world can still see your web site.
None of these programs will help you determine if you are reachable from the outside world unless you get yourself another colocated server in a completely different location to run the scripts on:
What you want is something like:
- Toolshack.com
- AlertMeFirst.com
- NetWhistle.com
- WebmasterSolutions
- Website Monitor
I didn't look hard for these, they are all on Yahoo's World Wide Web Software category. I haven't researched them, so YMMV.This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
The CONTENT tag is formatted as Seconds;url
I don't quite see how this would tell you if your web server is up, unless you happen to notice that IE timed out and gave you a nastygram to that effect. It puts an awful lot of trust into the user who is staring cross-eyed at the screen until the box crashes.
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\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
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Wierd. Although I don't think the Scientologists have anything to do with it, I too have noticed a general meltdown in DNS lately (past week at most). I had sorta attributed it to Bellsouth (my (on ADSL) and coincidently my servers (on T3s) DNS), but AT&T has been suffering as well (dial-up and ISDN), according to some of our offices in other states.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
How about mon ? its a great and flexible tool. you can set up to monitor web sites (witht their http client), and send alarms in various ways..
look at http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
How about Internet Explorer? Set it to a page with a 300 second refresh, and wait for it to pop up an error message.
While you're doing that, you might as well use MRTG and have some useful information (eg, bandwidth being used, DoS attacks in progress, cpu load average...) on that page.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
If you want to stay with self-run software I would check out either NetSaint or BigBrother, both are free. I stongly recommend NetSaint as it is easier to add custom service monitoring than BigBrother and I believe has a better interface. Big Brother however is simpler to setup and is all in Perl, so if you need to hack it up a bit, it's not too hard.
One thing no Corporation with a web site should be without is off-site monitoring. This is invaluable in determining whether people can visit your site. Two major players in this arena are RedAlert and ServiceMetrics. RedAlert runs a meer $20 per month per URL. And will test your site every 15 minutes to see if it is accessible, if it is not, it will email/page you. It also has the option of looking for a keyword in the response in order to make sure your CGI, Java, ASP is working.
ServiceMetrics is more expensive, but actually uses machines around the world to hit your site, and has more monitoring features such as variable SLAs, web-based traceroute, and HTML timing (in which they tell you give a web page, not only how long it takes to download the web page, but also how long it takes to do all the images associtated with that page, letting you know the total time for anywhere in the world.) I would strongly recommend RedAlert be added to your monitoring package.
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There've been lots of dns errors running around the past couple days; it's making me wonder whether this there's some greater issue underlying the widespread failures.
The internet was designed to withstand a coordinated attack at key servers, so if one goes down, the others keep chugging along. So all these dns errors can't have a technical explanation. They have to have a political one.
My suspicion is the Scientologists. We saw how much clout they had with removing that comment on slashdot a few weeks ago, so we know they have the means and the intentions to wreak havoc on a grand scale (attacking sites, such as slashdot, critical to our nation's growth and prosperity). So why would they stop there?
It wouldn't surprise me to learn they disagree with Yahoo too. Yahoo has been entering industries and distribution-networks that compete with the Scientologists' own enterprises. There is a finite number of stupid people in the world, and you can't get a monopoly if you're not willing to corner the market. That's why they attacked slashdot (cutting at the very nerve centers of geek inanity) and have been allegedly attacking Yahoo.
Punch that monkey for Scientology? No thanks, I'm full.
That's why it doesn't matter whether you can keep your own couple servers running, as this article alludes to. Unless you keep them from coordinated attack by malicious hackers, you're a sitting duck for corporate espionage.
It's free (GPL), if you're able to keep a machine online checking the site for you. It started off as a glorified Perl script and has turned into an amazing project. You can find the web site here: http://www.netplex-tech.com/software/nocol/. I've set it up at multiple places of employment and it's quite sufficient for a network monitoring tool, not just for web sites. Give it a try!
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Another monitoring app which I found so fun to play with I contributed code to the project is Peep: The Network Auralizer. It's certainly a unique idea for a monitoring app, and it tends to grow on you over time.
Hope this helps!
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.