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I've put this in developer's den just because it seems like the kind of thing a dev might know something about...

I'm looking for a really simple service that can monitor a few websites and send me an alert if they start misbehaving, either timing out or throwing errors. A nice bonus would be the ability to warn me if load times slow past a certain point. I'd really like an email or sms notification.

Any suggestions be they services I sign up to or scripts I can run on my own server?

EDIT:
I really need to be able to do this monitoring without having to install anything either on the servers or the websites running on the servers.

Have you seen New Relic? http://newrelic.com/

JdL wrote:

Have you seen New Relic? http://newrelic.com/

It looks very good but it's a lot more information than I'm interested in.

Also (and I should have mentioned this to start off with, I'll edit my post) some of the sites I'm interested in aren't ones I necessarily have control over so I want to be able to monitor them without having to install any code on the site. I must admit I didn't read everything on that page but at first glance it requires me to run something on the server or install some code in the site.

You want pingdom. That can monitor third parties just fine.

GodsMadClown wrote:

You want pingdom. That can monitor third parties just fine.

That looks amazing! It's exactly what I was looking for, a little pricey maybe but it looks like it's worth it. I've already signed up for a free account to give it a try for a bit.

Thanks

Any website you host will have events for just about everything generated from that server available in the application log for windows assuming you're running Windows and IIS. You can monitor those events with whatever you like. There are more robust things available I'm sure, I'm just used to writing my own.

The problem with something like load time as a metric is that it's subjective to where it's tested from. And even then, maybe the host is to blame and not some piece of inefficient design. Did the team who built this website handle scaling/balancing at all? It's practically a science of it's own.

We have a company we pay that has software it installs on our local servers and we get emails, sms, and phone calls depending on the site and urgency. If it storms and our backups don't kick for some reason everyone's phone blows up hah. Otherwise we use rackspace for everything and never worry about it.

Probably overkill, but PRTG is an amazing tool. you can define all types of counters. I use is for servers, routers, switches, WAN links, netflow/sflow stats, SNMP, CPU and Bandwidth usage, etc..., but you CAN define custom counters for damn near anything.

It may not be exactly what you're needing, but it's worth looking into. It's by Paeseller, so something German like that.

If you're feeling fancy, you can always install a nagios instance on a server. I use omd here at work. It has a check_http function that can graphs out your response times and the response size.

Or if you want to go "old school" just install a copy of wget (in Cygwin if you don't have a Linux system or VM handy), and write a script that periodically uses it to fetch the page you want to monitor. If the fetch time exceeds your threshold, have the script fire off an e-mail.

The software that I use is Anturis which is a cloud-based one and very simple to use. It monitors everything you need and even more, i mean servers, databases etc. The solution is free up to 5 monitors and they alert you by email.

My Company uses http://www.monitis.com/ but its a bit expensive but works. Its nice for more complicated testing. for example if you need to check to make sure your website is available around the globe so that you can test your cdn.

Another option is using an automated task runner like TeamCity. you can set up a job or shell script that hits your isalive page

One of Idera's CopperEgg products is website monitoring. They have a 14-day trial version. In fact, it's something I will be personally trying out as soon as I can make the time.