Two sites I maintain that are hosted elsewhere do not contact me when there are server outages. This has led to a few near heartattacks when the sites have gone down periodically. Are there any free utilities out there that trace and ping sites and perhaps send out an e-mail when there are outages? Any help or recommendation is greatly appreciated.
-Bessington
dmorison
5:55 pm on Aug 8, 2005 (gmt 0)
If you have dedicated server capacity somewhere to install your own scripts then Nagios [nagios.org] is a popular choice - it's a good open source service monitoring / availability checker. It's not a service you'd subscribe to - you'd have to install the software and manage it yourself.
jatar_k
5:56 pm on Aug 8, 2005 (gmt 0)
there are tons of them actually
try searching for website monitoring or similar, there are companies that do this as well as software you can run on your machine to do the monitoring
netguy
6:19 pm on Aug 8, 2005 (gmt 0)
Also keep in mind that tracert and pinging the server doesn't necessarily tell you much. We routinely use WebTrends 'Alert & Monitoring' that pings our various servers, but the server can often be running - and pinging normally - yet Apache has crashed and not serving the web pages.
Steve
bessington
11:12 pm on Aug 9, 2005 (gmt 0)
Thank you for all the replies! Are there any simple scripts that I can run to test site downtime myself? Any advice? Thank you.
