I manage a number of web applications and am being asked to generate statistics around their availability based on length and time of day of any downtime. Does anyone know of any tools and/or services which are available to facilitate this?
The applications are all java servlet applications with an oracle database on the back end. Access is generally prohibited except for authenticated users.
Not sure if it will work for your particular situation but I use nagios.
The organisation already has a contract with AlertSite which we have now extended to cover the additional webapps. It seems reasonable for basic availability monitoring and reporting. It sends a request to the application at predefined intervals from a number of different locations, and immediately sends a notification if it does not receive a correct reply from the login page. I have set it up so that each day it sends a report by email detailing the uptime for the previous day.