We need to monitor several websites we host, we basically have to make sure they are up over weekends when the machine room is unstaffed.

I have heard of software which runs and can test whether a website is down then SMS an error report to an admin....??

Or am I dreaming....LOL

n.b this is on a Notes Domino server so dont say IIS....:) (but presumably the monitor software doesnt have to be running on the Hosting PC - in theory it could be running anywhere?)

TIA

[Edited by Dr Hu - 9/24/2003 1:52:54 PM]

I looked into this a while ago.. Plenty of companies provide this sort of service if you're willing to pay for it.. have a search on google for server monitoring..

You could write it yourself, it's trivial to check if an http service is up or not. SMS isn't reliable enough for fault reporting though, depends how serious your need is of course.

Take a look at BigBrother. It can check connectivity, services (http, FTP, etc) and send out warnings. Ours is plugged into a modem which sends out pager messages.

Free

Zanlin

We use pagesentry and pagenow on an apple mac, it monitors upto 100 servers which is just about OK for us.

No idea on cost.

www.markspace.com and www.maxum.com are the developers

Any old crummy mac will run it, got loads here if you want one for beer money.

Pagenow does the SMS and pagesentry does the monitoring and emailing

[Edited by RichB - 9/24/2003 2:36:19 PM]

If u know PERL (or any scripting language), you can hack something together to check you're getting back a valid response to an HTTP request, and if not then either email/sms/whatever or try to take self-correcting action.

Cheers,
Nick.

chiark is correct,
we had a great perl scripter at my last place that put something like this together.
Let me know if you want to mail him & I will give you his addy, I'm sure he would adapt his scripts to accomodate for a fee:)
He is very good.

shunty