{"id":9789,"date":"2020-11-02T08:35:55","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T16:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.coretechnologies.com\/blog\/?p=9789"},"modified":"2020-11-02T08:35:55","modified_gmt":"2020-11-02T16:35:55","slug":"4-affordable-web-monitoring-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.coretechnologies.com\/blog\/software\/4-affordable-web-monitoring-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"4 Affordable Tools to Monitor & Bulletproof your Web Application\/Server"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Monitor<\/div>\n

Does your application accept HTTP requests?<\/h2>\n

Are you responsible for a mission-critical application that features a HTML, XML or JSON web interface<\/b>?<\/p>\n

And can you visit a URL (such as “http:\/\/yoursite.com:3232\/status”) to confirm that your web application is working well?<\/p>\n

If so, website monitoring tools — which periodically “ping” your site and confirm that requests are being accepted — can significantly improve your application’s reliability<\/b>. If you’re not already leveraging such tools, do yourself a favor and grab one today!<\/p>\n

Improving uptime: Detection vs. Remediation<\/h2>\n

Some tools focus on detection. Like the mythical canary in the coal mine<\/a>, their primary job is to recognize that there is a problem and quickly inform you<\/b>. They can give you a meaningful head start on resolving the problem — before your important customers start complaining.<\/p>\n

But while detection is clearly an advantage, the gold standard is remediation. A quick, automatic remedy<\/b> minimizes downtime and reduces (or eliminates) stress for the humans involved. Let the machines fix the problem while you eat dinner with your family! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

\nWith that important distinction in mind, let’s review a few inexpensive tools\/services that we have used in our professional lives, and a couple that our company has developed for Windows.\n<\/p>\n

1. Pingdom (Detection only)<\/h2>\n

Starting at $10\/month, Pingdom<\/a> offers a basic monitoring service that checks your URL every minute. If your site is unreachable, it will immediately email you to let you know.<\/p>\n

Here are the options when adding a new URL check:<\/p>\n

\"Pingdom<\/a><\/div>\n

Notice that you can configure the check to be performed from multiple geographies. That is a welcome feature if you have customers accessing your site from around the globe.<\/p>\n

The URL check’s alerting settings are equally intuitive:<\/p>\n

\"Pingdom<\/a><\/div>\n

And alerts can be sent via email or SMS\/text:<\/p>\n

\"Pingdom<\/a><\/div>\n

We use Pingdom to babysit a handful of customer sites\/applications. All in all, it’s a reliable detection tool that quickly shouts whenever there is a problem.<\/p>\n

2. SiteUptime (Detection only)<\/h2>\n

SiteUptime<\/a> is another excellent monitoring tool. It works much like Pingdom, but with a few extra capabilities.<\/p>\n

Adding a URL to check is straightforward. Only the basics are required:<\/p>\n

\"SiteUptime<\/a><\/div>\n

Things get interesting when you delve into the advanced settings. For example, you can choose the city from where the checks should originate:<\/p>\n

\"SiteUptime<\/a><\/div>\n

Alerts can be sent by email, sms\/text or by a phone call:<\/p>\n

\"SiteUptime<\/a><\/div>\n

PagerDuty<\/a> is also supported.<\/p>\n

You can use SiteUptime entirely free (with 1 monitor, 30 minute check interval) but the professional-grade service starts at $10\/month. Check it out!<\/p>\n

3. AlwaysUp (Detection & Remediation for Windows Applications)<\/h2>\n

While Pingdom and SiteUptime are affordable, easy to setup services, their effect is limited to failure detection. Once a problem has been identified, they cannot help you take action to resolve the interruption.<\/p>\n

That shortcoming is understandable. After all, those services work from the “outside”; they do not know anything about your web application (other than the URL you supplied).<\/p>\n

On the other hand, our AlwaysUp<\/a> utility — designed to run any application in the background as a Windows Service — can do more because it has control of your web application’s process. And at a one-time cost of $50 per server, it is a bargain.<\/p>\n

When configured with the check web server sanity check<\/a>, AlwaysUp will improve reliability by:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    Checking the URL every few seconds or minutes (configurable)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  2. \n

    Automatically restarting the application (or rebooting the machine) if the URL does nor respond or returns a 5XX error<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  3. \n

    Sending you an email to let you know what happened<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"AlwaysUp:<\/a><\/div>\n

    The result is that your web application will be down only for a few seconds or minutes<\/b>.<\/p>\n

    Note, however, that AlwaysUp works on Windows only. It is not an option for Linux web applications.<\/p>\n

    4. Service Protector (Detection & Remediation for Windows Services)<\/h2>\n

    If your application runs as a Windows Service, then Service Protector should be your tool of choice for improved reliability.<\/p>\n

    Like AlwaysUp, it will leverage the check web server sanity check<\/a> to:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. \n

      Check the URL periodically<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

    2. \n

      Automatically restart the service (or rebooting the machine) if the URL times out or returns an error<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

    3. \n

      Email you about the issue, to keep you in the loop<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      You can protect an unlimited number of services on a single server for $70. If you use the product for just a single year, that works out to $0.20 per day. Peace of mind, on the cheap!<\/p>\n

      Honorable mention (Detection only)<\/h2>\n

      We’ve heard great things about another three site monitoring tools but we have never tried them. If you not on Windows and are interested in detection alone, they are definitely worth a look:<\/p>\n

        \n
      • \n

        Uptime Robot<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

      • \n

        Uptime Monitor<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n

      • \n

        freshping<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        \nEnjoy!<\/p>\n