Sunday, April 17, 2011

Free Site Monitoring Tools

The straw that breaks the camel's back is the outage of my Firstmedia FastNET Cable Broadband at home. Again. Second time this month.

And I get the usual runaround about "Yes, we'll get our customer support engineer to monitor this and call you". Such bullshit. So, the second time this month, I use the threatening line "If this is not up, I am not paying for the downtime". Yeah, sure, she said, you can call our customer service to get that arranged.

But you know, i have never done that, even with the 1 week outage a few months ago. Cuz, I have no data. (as in, I can't even remember when was the outage. and I have no easily accessible record of when that happened.)

So this time around, I will get data.

I will get a site monitoring tool. I will monitor my home router, and if it ever went down, I will email me.

I don't really delete email. I have 15 years worth of email in my backup files. the last 5 years is in my computer, actively indexed for fast searches. Thats just me.

So if it is emailed to me, I can find it.

Now this have to be a free monitoring tool, of course. And I can use the finding to set up the web monitoring of my own company website. Two birds with one stone.

STEP 0a - Register for a free Dynamic DNS address so that you can monitor the ever-changing IP address of your broadband. I use dyndns.org. I have done this long time ago, so this part is set up for me.

SET 0b - Get a home router with dynamic dns option. I use Linksys WRT54G and a DLINK DL-524. Detail on this later.

STEP 2 - Choose a free site monitoring tool:

The first one I found is SYSOJO. Which advertise itself on google. Looks very powerful. It monitors website (HTML), MySQL, and even PING. As I am looking for Ping monitoring, its good enough.

For free, I can set it to ping my home router every 10 minutes, and on 3 consecutive failures, email me. The 3 consecutive failure is important, it is inevitable that at some time

The second I will try is from the recommendations of WebDistortion. It recommends 5 "best uptime monitoring tool".

This will be an ongoing post...

What features should I compare?

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