Im looking for a service to notify me when my servers go down. SO far I have been using a program on my personal comp, it can do a lot, but if its the cache or whatnot, its not working well. My dns servers have not been crashing just not accepting requests, so when I ping the dns server, and its not working, I get a ok signal. I want to use a outside source. My main problem is that my pager is just numeric. I only use the pager for this, and I didnt check with qwkmon.com about what types of pagers it supports, so now Im looking for a monitoring service that can numericly page me. Thanks

Get a cell phone that accepts text messaging. Then, write a script that checks to see if your WEBSITE is up (ping a webpage on your site). If it can't reach the webpage - it should send you a text message.

That's how we do it. We monitor it both internally and from another NOC. We get a few false reports of the servers being down...but its better to be safe than sorry.

--Tina

I agree with Tina. It's certainly always better to be safe rather than sorry.

http://www.serverrat.com/

icq / aim / email

also it tells you when it`s back up also.

You can also try Servers Alive. It's a great program - it will page you when the site is down and back up. Works w/ both numeric and alphanumeric pagers.

Dustin

http://www.woodstone.nu/

Originally posted by davidb
Im looking for a service to notify me when my servers go down. SO far I have been using a program on my personal comp, it can do a lot, but if its the cache or whatnot, its not working well. My dns servers have not been crashing just not accepting requests, so when I ping the dns server, and its not working, I get a ok signal. I want to use a outside source. My main problem is that my pager is just numeric. I only use the pager for this, and I didnt check with qwkmon.com about what types of pagers it supports, so now Im looking for a monitoring service that can numericly page me. Thanks


Another service you may want to consider is Internetseer. While they don't page you (I don't think), they offer some great services (no, I am not in any way affiliated with them, but I do use their free service for my basic site)

this is what I got off their site:

http://www.internetseer.com

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Originally posted by George



Another service you may want to consider is Internetseer. While they don't page you (I don't think), they offer some great services (no, I am not in any way affiliated with them, but I do use their free service for my basic site)

this is what I got off their site:

http://www.internetseer.com


If you have a cell phone that accepts email (most do, via text messaging) - you can use that email address and it would serve as a pager. :)

--Tina

Originally posted by AffordableHost


If you have a cell phone that accepts email (most do, via text messaging) - you can use that email address and it would serve as a pager. :)

--Tina

didn't even think of that, funny how its wireless devices that end up keeping us connected

Tina, great idea!

I wasn't thinking about that, but my Nokia 3360 accepts e-mail, so I could just have it alert me that way.

Does it cost anything to receive e-mails via wireless phone? I mean, its not like your taking up minutes.

Brian

Originally posted by BrianF
Tina, great idea!

I wasn't thinking about that, but my Nokia 3360 accepts e-mail, so I could just have it alert me that way.

Does it cost anything to receive e-mails via wireless phone? I mean, its not like your taking up minutes.

Brian


I do believe Sprint charges $10/month for the feature

I use ATT and I've been doing it for free for some time. I'm just wondering if it takes up minutes or whatever.

Brian

I have a digital phone with US Cellular and one-way text messaging is $4.95/mo. There are no minutes charges for it and if your phone is off / out of area, it keeps trying to deliver your message for 7 days.

Comes with both a web-site interface (so your mother can send you a message, if she knows your cell #) :) and also an e-mail address to which you can set up a forwarder/alias and/or your monitoring software.

I also picked up Server Sentinel for MacOS which was $30, it monitors any # of domains and ports and can do a # of things depending on success or failure. My only complaint is I wish it had a log, I didn't realize until after I bought it that it doesn't have a log feature, and I really don't want to keep copies of all my e-mails.. I'd prefer to call up a log file. But, oh well.

:)

So for $30 initially and $5/mo (which I would have done anyway to monitor mail receipt at "important" addresses) I can monitor any # of domains at different ports and at any interval, at the moment I am set at 5 minutes. And I have the personal peace of mind knowing what is going on.

:D Bailey

I currently use server alive, it is a great program but on days like today, where it goes on and off for 20 min, I get paged every 2 min about something being down or back up.

I use netsaint installed on a server that is on a different network than our other servers, each server then monitors the other. Netsaint is awesome, takes some time to setup and tweak though. But the status pages are awesome via the web and it will page you when it is down and when it has come back up.

Originally posted by smartbackups
I use netsaint installed on a server that is on a different network than our other servers, each server then monitors the other. Netsaint is awesome, takes some time to setup and tweak though. But the status pages are awesome via the web and it will page you when it is down and when it has come back up.
smartbackups, is that remote server your server or is it a NetSaint ASP ? I was really interested in installing NetSaint on one of my servers and I decided it was too much of a pain ;-) .