How do you monitor the availability of multiple websites

Question

I need to ensure that any number of websites and services haven\'t bitten the dust. At the moment I rely on a simple 5 minute cronjob which uses curl and a file of urls to c

Answer 1

I would recommend the ManageEngine from AdventNet (http://manageengine.adventnet.com/). It is free for up to 5 monitored resources iirc. Outside the free version it is rather cheap.

Out of the box It knows how to monitor webservices, webservers (of varying types, such as IIS, Tomcat, Websphere (5 and 6), and a host of other things such as natively pulling performance data from MSSQL and DB2. Webservices can be monitored just by "http-are-you-there" but you can also specify actual content to send from the wsdl specification, so you know that not only does the other side respond, but it is able to process records as well. (ofcourse this requires you to have a way of deleting these keep-alive data records afterwards but thats a different issue).

For each of the monitored systems you can setup thresholds to the alert, so it has to come 5 times in a row before triggering an SMS alert or automatically restart the service.

As an added bonus it has the best SNMP support I have seen anywhere.

Link to free download : http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/applications_manager/download-free.html

Linkg to demo: http://demo.appmanager.com/LoginPage.do

(Note: i'm not affiliated with the company)