A recent upgrade broke an instance of Nagios we use to monitor non-critical stuff. I've always been impressed w/ Nagios' massive feature-set but the web based GUI leaves a lot to be desired. That combined with the fact that I'm beginning to dislike the amount of daemon processes I have running all over the place has led me to consider alternatives.

As all this was unfolding, I just happened to come across a link to Site24x7 so I decided to give it a spin. Site24x7 makes HTTP/ HTTPS requests at regular intervals of time, tracks your website response time, and notifies via email or SMS when your website is down or when the response time has crossed certain limits you have set. That’s exactly no more and no less than what I need so I think these guys found a nice little sweet-spot.

It’s also free and beta.

I've been monitoring six different sites for a week and it pretty much just works. Here’s what lesscode.org’s monitor looks like at the moment:

site24x7

So that’s Site24x7 in a nutshell. Does anyone have experience with any of their competitors?

This entry has been tagged monitoring, nagios, admin, tools, web — follow a tag for an archive of related essays, weblog entries, and bookmarks.

Discuss

  1. I use UNIALERT.COM service which is free and reliable though does not have such nifty UI.

    — Max Ischenko on Friday, September 08, 2006 at 06:09 AM #

  2. Looks like unialert.com will monitor SMTP, POP3, IMAP, FTP, and, well hot-damn, they'll even monitor your counter-strike server. My main concerns are reliability (multiple redundant monitoring servers running on different continents would be a nice pitch), SMS notifications, and HTTP monitoring so perhaps I should check them out a bit more.

    Speaking of that, I'm not sure how reliable Site24x7 really is. When I first set everything up, I took a host down and it did catch it but that’s the extent of my testing.

    On an almost-related topic, the SMS/email notifications worked the way I usually setup Nagios: send me a single notification as soon as you see something is DOWN and then leave me alone until you see the thing come back UP. A lot of these things want to send a notification every two minutes, which usually results in me turning my phone off or ignoring the UP notification elsewise because I can’t distinguish it from the millions of DOWN notifications that came before it.

    — Ryan Tomayko on Friday, September 08, 2006 at 06:33 AM #

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