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?"

Comments

Maybe there's another explanation?

[alewando]

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.

I'd highly suggest Nocol

[bconway]

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!

Peep!

[Starky]

I find Big Brother to be a reliable, configurable, and robust monitoring tool. They have clients that run on both *nix and Windoze and hundreds of user-contributed plug-ins that can monitor everything from your Oracle instance to the weather in Chatenooga (sp?).

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!