If you manage your own web site, it’s critical to know when there are problems, and hopefully you’ll know before your users do. There are several enterprise-grade server monitors and website monitors available ranging from free to expensive, but if you need something right now that’s simple and free, you might consider the solution I put together using Montastic, Yahoo! Pipes and my cell phone.
My solution is not enterprise and it’s not real time, but it will let me know in a reasonable amount of time (Montastic says it checks every 10 minutes or so, based on load). For me, that’s good enough right now because I mostly want to avoid overnight and weekend-long outages that may occur when I’m not checking my computer regularly.
The first step is to sign up at Montastic and set up a monitor for your web site. There’s no learning curve there … just register, type in a URL and Montastic will start monitoring right away. There’s a video screen cast available showing how easy it is to use. After setting up the monitors, Montastic provides a basic RSS feed — that’s where Yahoo! Pipes comes in.
Yahoo! Pipes Configuration for Montastic
The final step I took was to simply run the pipe, then tell Yahoo! to send me the output of the pipe to my cell phone whenever it changes. Since the pipe updates when there is a new failure item, I won’t get an SMS message every time Montastic checks the servers, but only when there is a new failure item.
I haven’t been running this solution for very long, but so far it looks to be a promising concept for keeping an eye on my servers — particularly when I’m going to be away for a while. I’d love to hear ideas about other ways to use Montastic or suggestions for other free website monitoring tools. What do you use?
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