Is Your Site Down? Database?
Do you know? How about your database? Is your domain resolving? Are your site and pages up but just serving database errors?
We actually had an instance a couple weeks ago where our site was fully operational, but we were running into issues with the number of database connections. Unfortunately, we found out by an unhappy client notifying us. He didn’t understand why he had to bring it to our attention – he was right!
My predecessors had done the right thing and signed up with a monitoring service. It was a fairly pricey service at $49.95 per month. When I logged in, I was immediately lost trying to find my way around but I eventually figured out that we were only resolving our home page. We weren’t testing for an SSL certificate, we weren’t testing our subdomains, we weren’t checking whether or not the database was responding.
I quickly began to add another check and moved the time from 5 minute intervals to 1 minute intervals. When I clicked to submit the new ‘watch’, I was shocked to see that I would be charged a $99 setup fee and another $49.95 per month. That’s right – a $99 setup fee for something that I set up!!! I logged out and began searching for a new service.
I jumped on Twitter (my new search engine) and good friend, Ade Olonoh of Recursive Function, came to the rescue. (More blogging – less twittering Ade!)
The service is very reasonable as well. The basic is $9.95/mo and allows 5 checks, 20 SMS messages, unlimited email, uptime and load time reports, checks down to every minute, HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, Ping and UDP checks, etc. The Business service allows 30 checks and 200 SMS messages. They also have a very robust API if you’d like to integrate your monitoring.
The probe servers are in Dallas, Berkeley, Amsterdam, Vasteras, and Reading. I am trying to find out if I confirmed with Pingdom that we can bypass the SMS by simply building an email list of SMS email addresses for our staff’s mobile phones.
I also wrote the company with a feature request. It would be fantastic if, aside from Email and SMS alerts, they allowed an HTTP Request. This would allow me to monitor one of our 3rd party vendors who has been having issues lately. If I could have Pingdom make a request to my server, I could automatically switch our services over to a backup. Once the system came back up, I could have it switch back. I could do this with email; however, the delay could bite us.
We have 29 days left on the trial. As long as we don’t see any issues, we’re going to jump on the basic package. That alone will save us a few bucks and provide us with much more comprehensive site monitoring!
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