The Scariest Fun : notes from a web startup

I thought it might be a good time to share another tool that we work with. After running multiple sites over the years, I eventually started looking for tools to verify my site was up and running. I started by writing my own scripts to just verify my sites were accessible and email me if there were any problems. Then I found some online services that would check this for me, but they always seemed to run into their own issues. At one job, we used Nagios which is a great piece of Open Source Software, but may be a bit of overkill to set up for simple website monitoring. If you need customized and complex monitoring, I think Nagios would clearly be the way to go, but if you have simple needs, I think easier solutions would make sense.

So while continuing my search for an optimal solution, I eventually stumbled upon Mon.itor.Us, which has been a great solution for us. It is very easy to set up, most of the services are free. It can send weekly reports or only notify you when there is a problem on your network. It has some nice features such as accessing your site from a few locations across the globe, which gives you a better picture of your site’s response time.

Mon.itor.Us offers monitoring for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SIP, TCP, UDP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, PING, and DNS. The site also offers other monitoring services like user agent tracking, site visitor statistics, and other options. This more than covers our simple needs: in fact, we use other services for our visitor statistics.

Mon.itor.Us isn’t perfect, but has served us well. We wanted to get SMS notifications if any of our sites went down, which isn’t a free service of Mon.itor.Us. Seeing as we didn’t want to set up our own monitoring and dealing with enabling SMS, it was easily worth the $5 dollars that we spent to enable SMS notifications for our account. The time saved by outsourcing this function of our IT easily covers the minor cost. The only other complaint is that the site’s UI can sometimes be confusing. For instance, when I was trying to edit my account information, I could only figure out how to add new accounts, but not edit existing ones. It turned out that after viewing the 'new account' form you could then click on existing account names to edit them. The dual use of the form which initially is only for adding accounts wasn’t clear to me. Other than these minor complaints the service has worked extremely well for us.

Mon.itor.Us has made it simple for us to not worry about monitoring Seekler, so we can focus on other things like coding.