In today’s competitive global marketplace, it is essential to ensure that your customers can see you at any time, day or night. Even short outages impact your business.

System monitoring services provide everything from simple to very advanced server, network and website monitoring and reporting services with a fast, effective and automated method for checking a variety of services. Whether you are monitoring a single server or hundreds of servers distributed around the world, these packages make it easy to manage your monitoring configuration and view real-time monitoring data.

The number and types of services that monitoring packages track varies, but most offer at least three monitors that are checked in varying intervals (generally one to fifteen minutes).

These services and others should be a part of your disaster recovery and business continuity plan.

Advanced Solutions

If your business depends on your online presence, you need an advanced solution that monitors your entire online infrastructure. Today’s websites are becoming increasingly complex, incorporating dynamic content derived from multiple sources, backend web services, email, chat and other communication mechanisms.

There are lower end packages offered FREE, as well as advanced options that track your entire infrastructure. Some of the services most commercial packages track are HTTP and HTTPS, POP and Secure POP, IMAP and Secure IMAP, SMTP and Secure SMTP, DNS, FTP, SSH, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server databases, RTSP streaming media, ICMP ping, and arbitrary TCP/IP ports.

Options

The types of options offered are generally shorter intervals between monitoring, the number of monitoring locations, alerts by email, additional monitors, web page content filtering, HTTP password protection monitoring, monthly reports, online statistics, a control panel, DNS monitoring, public statistics, ping monitoring, alert failure limit, custom time zones, error details, web server monitoring, POP3 and SMTP email server monitoring, FTP server monitoring, multiple alert contacts, XML/RSS statistics and a statistics download.

With some you can create user accounts with restricted access. With others you can follow 301 or 302 redirects and monitor the resulting web page.

How far back can monitoring statistics and reports be archived?

Free plans are typically only archived for a few months, but with most packages, detailed statistics can be archived forever.

What about failover?

With many packages, their monitoring infrastructure is architected to withstand failure of any component. If one monitoring node is inaccessible, checks begin immediately from a alternate node and continue until the original node returns to service so that your servers never go unmonitored.

Intelligent Services

Some packages can actually analyze your online presence and intelligently determine the services that need to be monitored. Even with the most basic of online businesses, there can be 15 or more critical services that can impact your business.

What is it you need to know and why?

You need to know the status of your network (network performance) and availability every single minute so you can react immediately to any service disruption. It’ s always better to know first before your clients starting calling with issues. Monitoring packages also help determine hosting company’s compliance with their Service Level Agreements. (SLA)

False Positives

Are these packages failsafe? False positives have been a problem with some packages, but as global resources become more affordable, confirmation of service outages has become more reliable.

Other uses for monitoring packages

You can extract sales and marketing data about the quality of your infrastructure

Use the same tools to gain more knowledge about the infrastructure of your competitors.

Use as evidence with suppliers of your infrastructure.

As a manager

As a manager you may already have tools for monitoring your infrastructure from the inside, but these packages give insight to the end-user experience. You’ll not only be able to properly analyze the availability of your company’s services and estimate lost revenue, but you’ll also have the information you need to make demands on external network and service providers if they’re not living up to your expectations, or their SLAs.

What are some the packages available?

NPG

Panopta

Pingdom

AlertSite

Internet Uptime Monitor

Hyperspin

Site Uptime

Alertra

Uptime Auditor

Hello,

You could also check this one - site24x7.com

Regards

Thanks for the reference. Just checked it out - looks fairly comprehensive.

There's also justuptime.com from the justhost.com people... Fairly reasonable pricing. Had some issues early on with false alarms and there was a few days a month or so ago they disappeared for a couple days - not sure what happened there - never heard anything about it. But as a secondary monitoring service it works for us.

I'm seeing that they were down for a few days around May 1st and 2nd. Apparently, their servers were full and they weren't accepting any new clients. Don't know how true that is, but for sure they were 'Just' down. LOL.

This was the begining of last month (Apr. 1st-ish)... I posted at WHT about it and others confirmed they couldn't get there either. Think someone said something about a DNS issue. As it's a redundant check, I wasn't too worried. But it was somewhat ironic seeing a uptime monitoring service that is down.

Actually, you did post in early April, but there was a follow up on May 1st and 2nd where JustUpTime went down again. Hopefully, they have their issues resolved.

I didn't even notice the May outage - servers have been running clean since lately ... knock on nearest wood (man would say it's my head)

What's the URL?

NPG is Network Performance Group - http://www.networkperformancegroup.com/

Pingdom is pretty good -- I prefer it.

I too recommend Pingdom, a few of our customers uses WebsitePulse as well in addition to our in house nagios monitoring.

Thank you. I was trying to do some price comparisons, but no luck. I don't find pricing explicitly presented on the site.

Yeah, if pricing is there, it's hidden. The only thing I saw was "less than $25 per device" on their main page.

I absolutely hate that they put the NPG in different colors throughout their text on their site. It makes it very difficult to read. Also Gray instead of Black text is another pet peve