For some time now, we’ve been using the services of a company called Gomez to monitor our public websites. They do an excellent job for the corporate customer, monitoring from multiple locations around the world, and notifying by email, pager, and text message of any slow performance or outages. Lots of things are configurable (severity, maintenance blackouts, etc). They offer great historical reports we can use to track patterns, the IT managers can use to say “no, we aren’t ‘down all the time’, we had a single outage of 3 minutes on thursday, and a 30 second network glitch three weeks ago tomorrow”; and the execs can use to say “yes, we have 99.995% uptime on our servers, we’re working on that last .004% now” or whatever it is execs say. Gomez is great, and we love it. Only one problem. It’s outside. It can’t work for any of our internal servers.
Now, we can use the built in probing mechanism of Coldfusion MX 7 (love it, btw, great upgrade!), but it’s not as sophisticated. It also has some issues… it can only email one group of people if there’s a problem with *any* of the probes, it can’t text message or page (unless the phone/pager supports an email format), and its logging is very, very rudimentary. It also cannot handle more complicated scripts, such as Log in to this application, submit this form data, if the results do not contain X OR the results are Y, fail and report”.
So… what can? I’m hoping one or more of you loyal FG readers will have some ideas. If it’s something that can run from Windows 2003 server, all the better… we have a few linux hobbyists in shop, but no real experts.
Try WatchMouse (http://www.watchmouse.com), they are ‘outside’ as well, but offer a ‘plugin’ service that runs on your own server in the scripting language you prefer.
They have a 30 day free trial.
Lina
I’m not seeing anything there that would work inside a network…
IPSwitch’s WhatsUp is what we use at inline.com to monitor servers, websites, applications, services, and much more.
what you could do is just have a program that reads what the email report says, and then processes it appropriatly…
eg, if the report contains x, email to x@whatever.com
or, extract blahblah from report, send as txt msg to 0666232323 or whatever
Why not ask the Gomez people to develop the same reliable/detailed monitor for internal servers?
Hi JC,
http://www.watchmouse.com/en/faq.php?fid=20
The details about how to use the plugin are only available for registered users. I can email you the users manual if you like.
Seth -
Thanks! I grabbed a copy of it, we’ll be giving it a look.
Lina – Thanks for the link. I’m afraid a feature that gets a single passing mention in an FAQ file probably isn’t going to be robust enough to work, or it’s going to be an open hole in the firewall for their services to come in, which I don’t think the auditors would be too excited about. But if I’m mistaken, please, let me know. :-)
Hi JC,
I actually work in the Marketing dept. at Gomez and found your post from visitors linking in… appreciate the praise you gave us. I did, however, want to respond to let you know that Gomez does actually provide internal monitoring. I don’t know who here made you think otherwise, but if you are happy with the external monitoring service you may want to reach out to your contact to investigate. The link I pasted in the URL field, better explains this. Sorry for the plug, but hopefully it’s helpful…
Thanks, Mike! Almost no information there on your website, and what’s there is very vague, but we spoke to our contact about it today and we’ll have to see how that goes.
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This is very good idea
Hi there! Just couldn’t resist your guestbook!
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