External Site Monitoring

How did you know that your site is down? From your customers? Then it’s time to start using some external monitoring tool.

- I’m using Zabbix/Nagious. Why do I need any other monitoring tool?

Well, if you monitor your service availability from inside of your infrastructure you will miss networking issues between your infrastructure and user. You may not notice that your service is performing poorly in some countries or regions. So, in addition to internal monitoring, it make sence to setup at least basic external monitoring.

One well-know tool is pingdom. It is no longer free. The cheapest plan costs 12EUR per month.

Another service is StatusCake which has free subscription. You may setup HTTP,HEAD,TCP,DNS,SMTP,SSH,PING or PUSH probe to check your website availability. Test locations are limited for free plan: “Slower interval rate, randomly allocated test locations, and no advanced monitoring features. Great for open source projects & pre-revenue companies”. Check their pricing.

P.S. I was not paid for this ad, I just love StatusCake since it’s free and good enough.