anyone knows of a simple monitoring tool which can periodically send a request to a web service and alert me when it doesn't get a response? nothing fancy, just scheduling and reporting.
A:
Big Brother works well. We use it in our office to monitor a dozen very busy production servers.
Jim Blizard
2009-04-12 14:40:01
+1
A:
JMeter can do it as daemon process, the if you are using unix like platform cron helps you a lot
Steel Plume
2009-04-12 14:41:36
A:
A Web Service can be monitored like a Web Page, with tools such as curl or twill.
curl is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS and FILE. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos...), ...
...
twill is a simple language that allows users to browse the Web from a command-line interface. With twill, you can navigate through Web sites that use forms, cookies, and most standard Web features.
Repeating the probe can be done with cron on Linux and Task Scheduler on Windows.
gimel
2009-04-12 15:22:26
Very bad method: since cron has no memory, you will receive an alarm PER TEST. You must use a tool which has memory like mon or nagios.
bortzmeyer
2009-04-14 10:15:48
Monitoring tools (like cacti) are not simple. Of course, curl (or wget) do not check much more than availability.
gimel
2009-04-14 11:55:58
A:
The most common program in this area is Nagios. It has a scheduler which performs test at intervals you set, it has alarms when something goes wrong and it has plugins which perform the actual test. If there is no plugin for your service (a zillion of plugins already exist), you can write one without touching the main code.
I personally use mon instead because it is much simpler and writing monitors (the small script that do the actual test) is very simple. It does everything you expect from a monitoring tool such as setting intervals for the alarm (no need to tell me every minute that the Web site is down).
bortzmeyer
2009-04-14 10:20:53
A:
I'm using http://pingdom.com/ to good effect. It can not only check to see if a website is up or down, but can also be set to check for specific text (eg 'sql error', would be a fail). It's got plenty more features, and very nice reports, as well as regular emails for day-to-day status.
Alister Bulman
2009-04-14 10:29:44