[ale] Website monitoring companies

[Bob Slaughter]

> I am evaluating website monitoring services and was wondering if anyone 
> has any advice to share, or good/bad experiences with particular 
> companies. I need this not as a simple "is the site up" tester, but 
> as a traffic audit trail, from various locations, so I can see how 
> well a server is performing. My requirements are to check at least 
> every 10 minutes, from 3 or more geographical locations (1 or more non-US 
> would be a big plus), with latency measurements, and the ability to contact 
> by telephone with a problem. A reasonable price as well, of course. :)
> (The only port that really needs to be monitored is 80.)

When I was last doing this, just before I was laid off, NONE of the services 
out there would have met your criteria. None of them were reliable on 
'walking' through the site repeatably, and *any* change on the page, including 
sometimes just altering an image, would cause you to have to 'retrain' the 
monitor. I'm pretty sure one of them was SiteSearch, but I don't remember the 
others. Also, they'd only follow links; no browser 'back' buttons to go back 
and follow a second branch down. And, if that link was provided onto the page 
via a javascript, rather than HTML, it might not even 'see' it.

I don't know your criteria for 'reasonable', but *if* I remember correctly, SS
was on the order of $1000 to $2000 a month for just one walkthrough, for any
time increment of 15 mins or more; anything more frequent and the price went up
*fast*. 

And as far as I know, no one phones for this, they all send email. You'd likely 
have to cobble together a tool at your site that would catch the email and 
trigger a paging script. And if it's a significant network issue, for 
instance, you might not be getting incoming email anyway...

All of the above IMHO, and as mentioned, possibly highly dated as well.

-- 
Bob Slaughter, rslau at mindspring.com     http://www.mindspring.com/~rslau/
North Georgia Modurail: http://www.mindspring.com/~rslau/ngm/
In which language of the world does the word 'taxi' mean "I cannot drive"?
e'osai ko sarji la lojban fo lonu pilno -- http://www.lojban.org/


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