Site Monitoring Software

[Drastic]

I want something that checks at set intervals, and maybe sends sms or email when site is down, checks multiple (hundreds) of sites. Compiled stats over time for average site/server performance would be great too.

I saw this:
http://www.lonewolf-software.com/monitorwolf.htm

Which looked decent but thought I'd see if anyone might have recommendations.

[grnidone]

? You can't just cron this?

[Drastic]

I want to log ping response, check for html, etc. measured over time.

[jetboy]

I believe that OpenNMS and Nagios can monitor external servers out of the box. I would imagine that there are plugins available for Munin to do the same.

I'm using Munin to monitor server metrics (which requires munin-node to be installed on the server). Link to a multi-server Munin setup here: http://munin.ping.uio.no/

I use Pingdom.com to check server uptime externally, but I'm only checking a handful of servers. 100+ would be expensive. With this kind of service you're paying for its ability to check connectivity from multiple locations, and there's the expectation the the service itself is resilient. If that isn't a major concern, OpenNMS or Nagios should be able to do the job.

[Torben]

http://www.pingdom.com/

[Drastic]

Thanks for the input guys, I think I ran across what works best for me.

PRTG Network Monitor
http://www.paessler.com/prtg/

The base version (all features included for all versions, # of sensors is limited) comes with 100 sensors for $400, but they have a freeware version with 10 sensors. If you throw them a link on a site somewhere, they bump you to 20 sensors on a free license.

I really like this app, it's the most robust monitor I've seen yet, and I've looked at quite a few lately. (Though I admit I skipped the $1000 + apps.)

I decided I didn't need to monitor every site anyway, just every server, so 20 leaves me enough to monitor one site per server, so I'm just checking a site with db backend on each.

Runs its own server as a windows service, which you can set on your local ip to be accessible from anywhere on your network, or as localhost on your machine which is not visible elsewhere. It has a windows GUI app, but all controls and better reports are on the browser front end which has options for plain html and ajax. Use ajax for full functionality.

Sensors for anything on the Internet, including authentication, https, ftp, transactions, SSL cert expiration, etc. It has dozens of sensors available, including WMI for windows, SNMP, SSH, VOIP, SQL Servers and a bunch more.

Checks for content on page (or for content that triggers an alarm if present), and can do complete page dl time including scripts and images by using IE as the engine. Can trigger events/alarms for speed, state, volume or threshold.

Can test & log as often as once per minute.

Graphs and tables of data for downtime, loading time, bytes received, download bandwidth and time to first byte.

It can monitor any kind of network device, any automatically discovers anything on your system/network.

You can view live data, 50 items per page on a table, graphed for 24 hours or 2 days, 30 days, 365 days, or all historic data.

Iphone app available for $12. http://itunes.apple.com/app/iprtg/id326306472?mt=8

It's already given me a pretty good peek into server performance after 12 hours or so. I would only add one thing to the app, a way to put all sensor data in a table to compare the different sensors' (hosts in my case) stats such as bandwidth and time to first byte. But for free I'm not complaining, and I can live with it.

[ergophobe]

http://basicstate.com/ (free)

http://exactstate.com/ (more stats, little more money)