Hosted Continuous Application Monitoring Services

Question

Does anybody know of a good service or tool for continuos application monitoring? I'm looking specifically for something that is hosted, so we don't have to worry to much about the fact that the monitoring tool is actually running.

Specifically, we have a few e-commerce customers that we would like to provide detailed monitoring services for. We don't want to simply monitor uptime, we'd like to go through the entire checkout process once a day or even more often to ensure everything's working (adding to cart, shipping calculations, payment processing, etc).

We've tried site24x7.com but their recording tool just doesn't seem to offer the level of customization we need.

Does anybody have any recommendations?

Answer 1

A typical solution would be to use some robots using specific user accounts executing specific use cases on a regular basis. Using a set of scripts also used during regression testing, this worked good for me (for a core banking system).

Even the coverage for the interfaces to the back-end systems is astounding good in this case.

Answer 2

As far testing, you could probably hack something together with an AutoIt script, but this will have to be updated everytime you change you website interface. It would be my last resort, but thought I'd throw it out there for you if you hadn't heard of it.

Answer 3

Your best bet would probably be a product like Selenium (http://seleniumhq.org/) or Watir (http://watir.com/)

I know specifically selenium has the ability to automate it all on a server like a good continuous testing framework.

Answer 4

Ian: We are working on improving our web application recorder tool. Can you let us know what kind of customizations you are looking for?

Arun, Site24x7

Answer 5

IBM Netcool Internet Services Monitoring. Basically it invokes a bunch of scripts (you don't see the scripts but the nice wizard that says do X and then validate results) and then pulls out that raw data and creates health and performance charts.

Answer 6

I advice you to take a closer look at AlertGrid.

This is a service designed for totally custom monitoring scenarios. It's very flxible, on the other hand it requires to write some integration code but this is very simple as you can see here.

This is a hosted service, so you don't need to worry about painful installation and configuration.