Pingdom - use it on quite a number of projects and they keep adding more data checks around the world making it even better to triangulate back to where and why people are having problems.
I use cloudkick.com, which is a hosted service. It's the most accurate hosted monitoring I've ever used. Less false positives than any other hosted service I've used, and the fastest (accurate) notifications of true issues.
The catch?
You have to be using one of the hosts they cover (currently EC2, EC2 Europe, Rackspace, Slicehost.). They will probably add a bunch more soon, as they are organizers of the libcloud project, which aims to build interfaces for all popular providers. Code checked in so far covers Linode, vps.net, vCloud Express, for example. (http://libcloud.org/)
It's easy to install because you don't have to install any agents on your system. You just plug in your (provider) key at the friendly, easy Cloudkick dashboard, et voila. All the accuracy of agented monitoring, none of the mess/packages/server set-up.
(Lots of hosted monitoring services act like "agentless" monitoring, which means not that accurate or fast to notice things.)
Also, it's free. (Though it seems like they may have premium services one day.)
I'm working on http://nimbu.net/ at the moment that does what you're looking for. I've just added twitter alerts too if you use twitter. If you've got anything specific you would want to monitor then please let me know.
I just signed up for your service. The interface is quick, clean and intuitive - frankly, it's a relief to use it. I also have to give you props for having an SMS setup that works internationally. A handy addition for me would be DNS monitoring.
I've got lots of little sites that I'd like to monitor but that aren't that important and aren't making money. So I'm looking for a tool that has a free option but when one of my apps grows into a serious product I can start paying for more services.
For the free service, I'm looking for something that would notify me by email and SMS if the site is down or slow (within about an hour). So far it looks like http://aremysitesup.com/premium/ can do this. Pingdom is way too expensive for my needs right now.
I would love to support a fellow Hacker News reader. Does your app fit my needs?
Why not write a script that checks the site from a cron job on a different server. You can have it send an email or text via twitter. Cron is a simple service. And if you can write a script that emails you or your phone, you only need to place it on a very reliable server or 2.
I wrote a script, run via cron, that checked a ticket web page every 30 minutes for concert ticket availability. If the text changed, it implied that the tickets were available; the script sent an email to my phone, a text message, telling me call for tickets. ( Ratatat was the band )
Does anyone know of a monitor that validates entire pages? I want to make sure that my site was not defaced so I would like to compute and compare hash values for a set of files.
Hmm. So I've been writing an uptime monitor and this is an interesting idea. How would you update the hash and how would you handle dynamic content? If the service offered this feature via API seems like a lot of work on the user end.
I use pingdom, it runs on remote servers where locally run systems will fail if your datacenter loses its internet connection etc. Can't fault it but ignore the response times, I think the pingdom servers are just slow ;)
I use http://sucuri.net/ for a very simple up/down, content changed notification system. It tracks those as well as DNS, HTTP Certs and a few more. It's also free :)
Wow, that seems like a great service for completely free! I assume you've had a good experience with them? How long have you used their services and how many web sites do you monitor?
It requires some setup but the big advantage of this is that it can not only tell you when your site is down, but sometimes ACTUALLY FIX IT by restarting nginx or whatever you need it to do.
This is something a monitoring service can't do since they don't have access to your box. Of course it's not going to be able to fix all situations that could cause downtime, but if it hits a scenario you anticipated it will.
Don't use it to the exclusion of external tools though. monit doesn't help if the server has no connectivity or no power. On a similar tangent, configuring a mutual restart policy (eg: if cron fails monit restarts it and vice versa) is also a good idea.
[+] [-] EGF|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alecco|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petervandijck|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spencerfry|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thesethings|16 years ago|reply
The catch?
You have to be using one of the hosts they cover (currently EC2, EC2 Europe, Rackspace, Slicehost.). They will probably add a bunch more soon, as they are organizers of the libcloud project, which aims to build interfaces for all popular providers. Code checked in so far covers Linode, vps.net, vCloud Express, for example. (http://libcloud.org/)
It's easy to install because you don't have to install any agents on your system. You just plug in your (provider) key at the friendly, easy Cloudkick dashboard, et voila. All the accuracy of agented monitoring, none of the mess/packages/server set-up.
(Lots of hosted monitoring services act like "agentless" monitoring, which means not that accurate or fast to notice things.)
Also, it's free. (Though it seems like they may have premium services one day.)
[+] [-] moomerman|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewtj|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techiferous|16 years ago|reply
For the free service, I'm looking for something that would notify me by email and SMS if the site is down or slow (within about an hour). So far it looks like http://aremysitesup.com/premium/ can do this. Pingdom is way too expensive for my needs right now.
I would love to support a fellow Hacker News reader. Does your app fit my needs?
[+] [-] aneesh|16 years ago|reply
It sends you an email when a site goes down. The free version pings every 20 minutes or so.
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
Monit after a tip here, great little program.
[+] [-] dlsspy|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuntgoat|16 years ago|reply
I wrote a script, run via cron, that checked a ticket web page every 30 minutes for concert ticket availability. If the text changed, it implied that the tickets were available; the script sent an email to my phone, a text message, telling me call for tickets. ( Ratatat was the band )
[+] [-] techiferous|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DenisM|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cracell|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timtrueman|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvs|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niels|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eworoshow|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warp|16 years ago|reply
I'm not familiar with that service btw, just remembered seeing that here a few days ago. I use nagios both at home and at work.
[+] [-] matthewking|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truebosko|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techiferous|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajuvegesna|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barmstrong|16 years ago|reply
It requires some setup but the big advantage of this is that it can not only tell you when your site is down, but sometimes ACTUALLY FIX IT by restarting nginx or whatever you need it to do.
This is something a monitoring service can't do since they don't have access to your box. Of course it's not going to be able to fix all situations that could cause downtime, but if it hits a scenario you anticipated it will.
[+] [-] andrewtj|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wowfactor|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daleharvey|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylanz|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johng|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carl_|16 years ago|reply