When you start managing hundreds of web sites, it becomes critical to ensure your web sites are live and performing well. Even if you only have one Blog that you care about, it’s nice to know if the site is actually up and running. In an ideal world, your data center, or web host would be up and running 100% of the time, and in case of a failure, inform you. Unfortunately this is not the case.
How much does it cost you to have a site down? How unhappy do your customers become when they try and access their site, and its down! One solution is to write a ping tool on your own, and monitor your sites. This actually works really well, however there are some free tools on the Internet, and some paid services, that actually do a great job these days.
monitorus is a wonderful service similar to pingdom, however it is free! One plus side to pingdom is the ability to do internal monitoring as well as the external monitoring. This means you can also monitor disk space, CPU usage. With monitorus you can also monitor your VoIP Gateway, E-mail servers, and other Network Devices and Servers.
Installing the Smart Agent is extremely easy, simply download from your control panel, and install on your server. You will be emailed an activation key, which is simply entered into the new system tray application, and you are up and running.
Figure 1 – Install Smart Agent
Once you have installed the agent, you can easily create reports and tests to run on your server.
Figure 2 – Create Tests
So you now have external monitoring of your site with information on if it goes down at all and its response time, you also have the ability to find out if your memory is running low, or your CPU is being hammered. There is more! This package also lets you track your visitors via a basic Web Analytics Package. Setting it up is again very simple!
Figure 3 – Visitor Tracking with monitorus
monitorus is a fantastic tool, and best of all, most of the features are free! This one gets my recommendation.
Pingdom offers everything from simple to very advanced server, network and website monitoring services. Pingdom offers you the ability to monitor your servers and infrastructure 24/7, all year long. They have a multitude of monitoring servers placed all over the world with just one goal in mind: To alert you as soon as any of your servers, networks or services fail. Pingdom gives you full control over your infrastructure.
The best part about pingdom is it only takes 5 minutes to set up and you’re up and running. Everything is done through their custom interface, and no code needs to be added to your website. No software is needed to be installed and you will be monitoring your websites instantly.
Unlike monitorus, pingdom is $9.95 per month. However I find the reports you get from pingdom are much better quality than competitors.
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