Hey Folks -

I've been looking at all the different providers, we currently use Alertra. Curious, for those of you who do use server monitoring, how much do you set aside per server in your budget for the monitoring?

Prices range from few bucks, quite a few a month for monitoring depending on if you get 5 minute, or 15 minute...etc.

Who uses 5 minute? who uses 10? Do you use it mostly as a pre-sales tool and assurance to your customer, or do you actually use it so you are notified when your server goes down...

There hasn't been a really strong server monitoring thread that I could find...I'm not looking for actual recommendations on specific companies, rather prices, why you choose X time, etc.

We use 5 min interval monitoring. It's meant for our eyes only to indicate our performance in the long run as well as immediate notification of a downed service and such.

If need be, we provide the stats to aid pre-sales questions if there are any.

At this point I use http://www.siteuptime.com/

They are offer the most bang for the buck, and since I didn't want to an arm and a leg just for someone to monitor my servers it costs me $5.00 a month for hitting the servers every five minutes. So for that price I can get 5 service monitors different services if I choose or for multiple servers if I want.

**Removed by moderator - Links to commercial sites not allowed.**

If the servers become unavailable I do get notified right away,
I use the tool for both new sales and guaranteed uptime reports for current customers.

I use 5 minute monitoring because anyone can look good if their server is available once an hour. Using 5 minute monitoring really shows if your servers a solid or not, at list in up time. IMO


I have zero problems with siteuptime.com. They have delivered on their service commitments and have not let me down.

WebzPro - is that page generated dynamically?

Originally posted by GideonX
WebzPro - is that page generated dynamically?

using <?php include("xxxxxx"); php?> tag

Actual pages

http://www.siteuptime.com/prem_statistics.php?Id=1221&&UserId=10658

http://www.siteuptime.com/prem_statistics.php?Id=1092&&UserId=10658

Gotcha, was just wondering :)

This was just posted in another thread. Nice list here.

http://pingtopia.com/

Good resource WebzPro, thanks. :)

We use websitepulse. I use to do 3 minutes 3 locations and 3 interfaces. But it got too expensive as the number of servers grew. So now we only monitor 2 servers every 5 minutes from 1 location and it's for use to keep some statistics of uptime (for use in presales and internal use)

We now run our own monitoring server monitoring up to 7 services every minute for every server.

We built our own homebrew monitoring scripts for this.

It monitors servers & gateways every 60 seconds and pages whoever is on duty as well as putting an alert up on our support center in the event that a server or gateway either loads too heavily or becomes unavailable.

At a certain number of servers, it becomes more economical to use your own. Toss nagios, big brother, cacti, etc., on a remote box, and control all the monitoring settings yourself.

We use Alertra at 10 minute intervals. In earlier days it was used not only as a promo tool but also for actual monitoring (alerting us when things are down etc).

Now we have nagios setup on a remote box which does 100x more detailed monitoring at much lower intervals on all servers so we use and rely on this for actual monitoring. Alertra is still in place for promo (along with a custom made frontend for nagios for real time status page) so we have real third party stats to show clients and potential clients.