Please recommend a website monitoring service

mally · Oct 17, 2011

Hello all, I'm finding every now and again my sites are down and I have to email the hosting supplier to inform them.

Most of the time its database errors, which don't show up on downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Can I ask what you guys use, the costs and what it detects and does (i,e email/SMS)

Ashton · Oct 17, 2011

I love some of the tools pingdom provide, so there web site monitoring should be good. 30 day risk-free trial available too:

http://www.pingdom.com/

Although, if you're having database errors it would probably best to sort them first (and if its connecting to the database, perhaps a new host!)

monaghan · Oct 17, 2011

We resell hyperspin, they have an option to monitor MySQL.

Alternatively, I'm in the process of setting up my own off-site monitor for my servers, I'd be happy to look at monitoring yours on this system (obviously not as many monitoring points than a 3rd party monitoring system, but potentially more customisable)

retired_member33 · Oct 17, 2011

I use http://uptimerobot.com/

It is free and does exactly the same as what all the paid services do.

Have used it for about a year now and works great, not a single complaint.

Ashton · Oct 17, 2011

UptimeRobot looks good but may not show database errors.

You could make it redirect to a 503 on failed connection to the database, then monitor the redirecting page to see if it redirects?

For example:

Db test.php:

<php
if(!$cxn = mysql_connect("localhost", "username", "password") {
header('Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/noconnection.html');
}
?>

The htaccess that to a 503:

RedirectMatch 503 ^/(?!noconnection\.html)
ErrorDocument 503 /noconnection.html
Header always set Retry-After "18000"

not 100% on this though!

daleduan · Oct 19, 2011

I am using FreeWebMonitoring and InternetSeer for my websites. These two offers free services. I'm not really sure if they are exactly what you need.

philliph · Nov 3, 2011

If you want to do the monitoring yourself, Nagios is very good

www.nagios.org

A good feature I use for the shared hosting servers I sysadmin is the ability to request a page and give a status code. 200/404/500 etc..

It's easy to link it to an SMS gateway too.