Should AdSense Offer Alarm Monitoring?

They already offer analytics and this is easier!

[incrediBILL]

Had a nasty problem last night that caused my server to generate some "Server 500 errors" for a while and my PREVIOUS (ie. fired and replaced today) monitoring service didn't send me an alarm for this problem and didn't even register it on their site, so I easily lost 12 hours worth of revenue.

The point is, not only did I lose money, so did AdWords advertisers and SO DID GOOGLE!

So here's a simple question I'll toss out in the open for the Big G:
Why don't you supply your AdSense publishers and AdWords advertisers a free monitoring service?

Think about it Google, it's a no brainer as you offer all sorts of tools to help webmasters get indexed, analyze their traffic, A/B test ads, and everything to improve both THEIR and YOUR bottom line except you fall short of checking to see if the site it still up and alert the webmaster when it's down!

I'll bet everyone would sign up for a simple site monitoring service that could send an email and/or SMS to alert your customers when they are down.

Considering that either the Googlebot or Mediapartners-Google spiders are on our sites all day long already, how hard would it be to send an SMS if the site doesn't respond or generates a 400 or 500 error, especially on the index page, to the AdSense or AdWords account owner that claims that domain?

Wouldn't the rest of you use a site monitoring tool if Google offered it?

Looks like a win-win for everyone!

How about it Big G? :)

[edited by: incrediBILL at 2:15 am (utc) on June 13, 2007]

[celgins]

I would definitely use it. I've had similar situations where revenue was lost simply because my site wasn't functional.

Unfortunately for me, I'm with an ISP so I still had to wait for their slow techies to solve the problem.

[plumsauce]

Some monitoring services only ping your server. So if your server is broken, but still responding to pings, the service will not mark it as being down. Other services try for a http connect only, and as long as they get a connection, again, failure to mark the server as down. The best services fully emulate a browser and note dns resolution times, status code, time to first byte and time to last byte.

There is at least one free service that does the full emulation and sends email/sms when problems occur.

[potentialgeek]

Google should offer it as often as it spiders a site. That's a fair deal.

Btw, I check adsense once an hour--not just to see the rev--but for site monitoring (downtime). Got burned before b/c the host had some idiot making irrational decisions.

p/g

[zett]

incrediBILL,

it's a great suggestion, and really easy to implement. When you sign up for Google's webmaster tools, you already have to place a certain file with a unique filename into the root directory.

It should be easy enough to just make the final step to frequently monitor the service and if the check fails, send a short message, either free to your mailbox or as a premium to your mobile.

(OTOH, if Google has to make a decision on using development resources, I would rather like to see a bigger filter list which is as easy to implement.)

[Hobbs]

Not only would I sign up, I would pay for the service if they throw in an earnings report via sms too.

[DamonHD]

Yes, I think that would be a good feature Hobbs...

[netmeg]

We built our own monitoring across our servers; if anything goes down three of us get SMS, but I would probably use one if Google provided it. Heck, the googlebots are here on the servers all the time anyway.

[iwannano1]

Google’s main business is search and ads. Not your server monitoring or servers health.

We have 5 servers and we monitor them from 12 different location provide by my service provider.

You can also use service or you can use open source software's for the same.

[edited by: jatar_k at 12:30 pm (utc) on June 14, 2007]
[edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit]

[incrediBILL]

Google’s main business is search and ads. Not your server monitoring or servers health.

If your server is down you can't display their AdSense ads so it's all related to their bottom line.

[DamonHD]

Google *does* already offer the facility to send an SMS when your AW credit card fails, and it's proven useful to me a couple of times.

So they have the facilities, and it would help ensure their money flow on the AS side to do what Hobbs suggests.

Rgds

Damon

[edited by: DamonHD at 5:45 pm (utc) on June 13, 2007]

[iwannano1]

If your server is down you can't display their AdSense ads so it's all related to their bottom line.

Considering that they paid above 70% profit this year to all publisher - I don’t think so AS will take load of monitoring millions of publishers websites/servers (many publisher has more than 1 sites or servers) worldwild and send each and every person a text or email message is going to increase the cost. This will eat up their profit margin. Most business focuses on core business activity, IMHO.

I have few servers that does not mean I should start a shared hosting side business. Although I can as I have plenty of resources; but I will only focus on my publishing activity aka core business (just my example)

I do understand your point of view but I don’t like the idea of depending too much on G for everything.

Even if google offered such a service in a near future I will not use them as they are not expert in system monitoring :P even google uses external monitoring service for their own infrastructure ;)

[incrediBILL]

I don’t think so AS will take load of monitoring millions of publishers websites/servers

Um, they already take that load with Google Analytics for millions of pages viewed per hour on millions on websites AND they crawl my site all day long with about 5,000 pages downloaded daily.

If any of those pages generates an error, just check the index page and if both fail, send me an SMS, that's all, nothing fancy.

Even if google offered such a service in a near future I will not use them as they are not expert in system monitoring

They weren't an expert at analytics either.

They bought Urchin.

[jomaxx]

It would be doable without too much effort, but there would be way too many false positives unless they built in some kind of a time lapse. You can't be sending out messages every time there's a temporary network glitch or the server is being rebooted.

OTOH, it would be useful if implemented well, and doesn't have to be limited to AdSense. If you're going to do to the trouble of building it, Webmaster tools seems like a better fit for something like this.