Validity of Website monitoring

Freebies Website monitoring.. What good r they?

[netneurones]

I've been subscribed to a website monitoring service which is free. It is supposed to be good but unfortunately, it keeps on giving wrong error messages (my sites r off when it says everything's ok and viceversa...)..

Have some of you experienced the same thing?

What other alternatives exist, especially if one has access to a broadband always on connection

[Dreamquick]

Assuming you trust that your "always on" connection is always up you could just write a script to a simple GET on the homepage and then check the status code and/or page content look okay.

I wrote a very simple reporting batch file a while ago (gave it a little test and it even works) - it uses the scheduling system in Windows and NetCatNT to check if the http service on a machine is up or down;

@ECHO OFF

E:\Temp\Netcat\nc.exe 127.0.0.1 http < HttpGet.txtĤfind "200 OK">NUL
IF errorlevel == 1 (
ECHO -%COMPUTERNAME% - Service stopped on %date% at %time%>>Results.txt
) ELSE (
ECHO +%COMPUTERNAME% - Service running on %date% at %time%>>Results.txt
)

Where HttpGet.txt contains;

GET / HTTP/1.0
USER-AGENT: ServiceTest
CONNECTION: close

This was really a quick script that just gets the root page and ensures that the data it returns contains "200 OK" meaning that the page worked without any issues.

However there is nothing to stop you calling another program or command in addition to the reporting "feature".

- Tony