+1 for copperegg. Their free plan is much better than uptimerobot. My only comment is that their UI is not overly intuitive, but you don't really have to look at it after you've set it up.
Is it designed for a much larger screen than mine (1280x800 at the moment, the max on my laptop)? I have both horizontal and vertical scroll bars showing up, even when putting it to fullscreen, and some areas still overlap so I cannot see the content (that "sort monitors" section for example).
Otherwise I set up two monitors, look interesting, useful, and well done! Good job!
I really like the design and I am trying it with a couple of tests, but it seems to be reporting the opposite of reality. Shows one of my sites as down though it says Keyword Found and it shows the response time, while another one which is really down is shown as up:
Kinda-sorta-related: 10 years ago this month, I quit my job to finish my first product: a server monitoring system that I ultimately never launched. I did a little writeup of it earlier this year: http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/esonar-resurrection
So every time I see a post, ad or anything about server monitoring systems, it makes me smile. It's one of those projects that everyone has: "One of these days, I'll work on it."
The off the shelf services will only get you so far, even with keyword search. Sometimes you just have to roll your own.
With a complex ecommerce build you can run into situations where something has gone badly wrong with the pricing, e.g. everything is marked up as on sale, price £0.00. With a roll your own solution you can build an XML tree of the document, go through your HTML tags and put in some rules to make sure that all the prices are greater than zero (for instance).
As for keywords, you want something on the page in the footer, however, that can change. Eventually I ended up using the content between the <noscript> tags as that really did not change (even though they were at the top of the page).
Sending out an SMS is not hard to do, however, now that people have email on the phone it is not really that useful plus your credits can run out.
A 'roll your own' solution with advanced content checks can be used with a standard 'Uptime Robot' type of service. Clients can have the 'Uptime Robot' and manage it themselves, they will get great peace of mind. Meanwhile, the homebrew check can give a developer a heads up on things going wrong before they go wrong (as far as the client is concerned) and pick up on more subtle failings that a client really doesn't need to be told about at odd hours of the night.
Depending on your traffic levels you may also want to remember to take the IP address of your check program out of your stats.
If anyone does want a very simple PHP script to iterate over a list of URL's (and their respective search strings), do the CURL thing and some DOM parsing, with SMS mailout of whatever the 50x fail is then I can find you one.
I have been using this for a while on my servers. For some months, I had Pingdom and Uptime Robot monitor the same server. According to my experience, the latter has less false positives - with Pingdom, it sometimes looked as if it was monitoring its own network congestion, and not the availability of my websites.
Uptime Robot also has an API like Pingdom, but with the added benefit you can monitor up to 50 websites for free. The API allows me to almost never log in to the control panel, as I watch the status using my custom monitoring panels.
This. False positives are terrible. We monitor google & amazon along with our services. If us, google & amazon all look down, it's a false positive. Not sure why pingdom doesn't do this for us, but whatever.
If you have something critical to monitor, my advice is to stay away from Uptime Robot. I've used them for a couple years along side my Pingdom checks. They often don't deliver notifications. My last notification is ".... resource is down. We'll notify you when it's back up." That was 10 days ago and it was down for a few minutes. I was never notified of it coming back up. This is just typical. It's also common that I never get a notification of a down resource, too.
One benefit of using this over Pingdom: they have a location in outside of the US and Europe (Singapore). If a networking issue causes your site to appear down for Japan, China or India Pingdom won't know.
Looks like the front-end still needs some polishing. A cursory glance shows a type (My Settings -> Add Alert Contact -> Mobile (SMS) "...that suppor it..." , multiple clicks on the main logo pull up multiple "Loading" messages.
Also, I find it odd that the interface is > 1280px wide(at least it is for me presently). I'm not used to a horizontal scroll on a 13" MBP.
Overall, if it turns up less false positives than Pingdom, I'll be happy.
I work for PagerDuty. What issues are you having with the Pingdom integration? I'm sure some of our other integrations may be of interest: http://www.pagerduty.com/partners/. If you have any questions or need any help feel free to contact me.
Come check us out at https://www.statuscake.com - we do have Pagerduty integration via the API (It's not full featured yet to be honest, but I'd say within the next few weeks we'll have an even better connection)
I use pingdom tools (with sms notifications), port-monitor.com, think i'll add this to them as well. Never hurts to have a few things checking sites.
One thing this is missing is being able to look for a string on a page. (either checking it is there (like "Loaded"/"Latest Posts"...something to indicate all is working fine), or checking it isn't there (like "error", "database connection error" etc)
Interesting...I created an MVP off of a domain I bought a few years ago called http://www.uptimebot.com
It has been on the back burner for a bit now because I wasn't able to get traction/vistors onto the site...I guess maybe I should figure out what I was doing wrong.
They seem to be having some odd errors in the signup that prevent it from showing it actually processed. Did get an email asking to verify the account so it sounds like its only a client side problem... seeing an error from jquery validation.
Have been using this service since the time id had pretty bad UI, was correct each time with most updates to SMS via Twitter in India. Now, the UI is amazing, though we use it only for few seconds.
[+] [-] WA|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deanpcmad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangrossman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpkeisala|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ronaldx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ollydbg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eknkc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smathieu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imrehg|12 years ago|reply
Otherwise I set up two monitors, look interesting, useful, and well done! Good job!
[+] [-] gpmcadam|12 years ago|reply
Anyway, we ended up using StatusCake[1] instead, if anyone is looking for an alternative with more features and less restrictions.
[1] https://www.statuscake.com/
[+] [-] dxchester|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umami|12 years ago|reply
http://cl.ly/image/1Y1U3b0z2U0U
http://cl.ly/image/3c0e38312a2W
edit: If it is of any use for debugging, these sites' IDs are: 775909552 (up) and 775909549 (down).
[+] [-] umami|12 years ago|reply
http://cl.ly/image/2L1V1A2K180f
Liking the service a lot by the way! That's why I am reporting what I find.
[+] [-] kmfrk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chops|12 years ago|reply
So every time I see a post, ad or anything about server monitoring systems, it makes me smile. It's one of those projects that everyone has: "One of these days, I'll work on it."
[+] [-] Theodores|12 years ago|reply
The off the shelf services will only get you so far, even with keyword search. Sometimes you just have to roll your own.
With a complex ecommerce build you can run into situations where something has gone badly wrong with the pricing, e.g. everything is marked up as on sale, price £0.00. With a roll your own solution you can build an XML tree of the document, go through your HTML tags and put in some rules to make sure that all the prices are greater than zero (for instance).
As for keywords, you want something on the page in the footer, however, that can change. Eventually I ended up using the content between the <noscript> tags as that really did not change (even though they were at the top of the page).
Sending out an SMS is not hard to do, however, now that people have email on the phone it is not really that useful plus your credits can run out.
A 'roll your own' solution with advanced content checks can be used with a standard 'Uptime Robot' type of service. Clients can have the 'Uptime Robot' and manage it themselves, they will get great peace of mind. Meanwhile, the homebrew check can give a developer a heads up on things going wrong before they go wrong (as far as the client is concerned) and pick up on more subtle failings that a client really doesn't need to be told about at odd hours of the night.
Depending on your traffic levels you may also want to remember to take the IP address of your check program out of your stats.
If anyone does want a very simple PHP script to iterate over a list of URL's (and their respective search strings), do the CURL thing and some DOM parsing, with SMS mailout of whatever the 50x fail is then I can find you one.
[+] [-] gbl08ma|12 years ago|reply
Uptime Robot also has an API like Pingdom, but with the added benefit you can monitor up to 50 websites for free. The API allows me to almost never log in to the control panel, as I watch the status using my custom monitoring panels.
[+] [-] mml|12 years ago|reply
(fwiw, we're moving off of pingdom too).
[+] [-] lucasjans|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepyhead|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troels|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calpaterson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ad1el2or|12 years ago|reply
Also, I find it odd that the interface is > 1280px wide(at least it is for me presently). I'm not used to a horizontal scroll on a 13" MBP.
Overall, if it turns up less false positives than Pingdom, I'll be happy.
[+] [-] jdaley|12 years ago|reply
Other than minor things it's working well so far.
[+] [-] tomasien|12 years ago|reply
No idea if it still works, assume it does!
[+] [-] morgo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jorts|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djdclarke|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arb99|12 years ago|reply
One thing this is missing is being able to look for a string on a page. (either checking it is there (like "Loaded"/"Latest Posts"...something to indicate all is working fine), or checking it isn't there (like "error", "database connection error" etc)
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ollydbg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallegan|12 years ago|reply
It has been on the back burner for a bit now because I wasn't able to get traction/vistors onto the site...I guess maybe I should figure out what I was doing wrong.
[+] [-] smallegan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaeawc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huskyr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackkitzmiller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RafiqM|12 years ago|reply
It can do keyword checking as well as standard ping + port connect.
That's about all it does, which is fine by me.
It's free and it works.
[+] [-] Naushad|12 years ago|reply