Free Site Monitoring Tools

The straw that breaks the camel's back is the outage of my Firstmedia FastNET Cable Broadband at home. Again. Second time this month.

And I get the usual runaround about "Yes, we'll get our customer support engineer to monitor this and call you". Such bullshit. So, the second time this month, I use the threatening line "If this is not up, I am not paying for the downtime". Yeah, sure, she said, you can call our customer service to get that arranged.

But you know, i have never done that, even with the 1 week outage a few months ago. Cuz, I have no data. (as in, I can't even remember when was the outage. and I have no easily accessible record of when that happened.)

So this time around, I will get data.

I will get a site monitoring tool. I will monitor my home router, and if it ever went down, I will email me.

I don't really delete email. I have 15 years worth of email in my backup files. the last 5 years is in my computer, actively indexed for fast searches. Thats just me.

So if it is emailed to me, I can find it.

Now this have to be a free monitoring tool, of course. And I can use the finding to set up the web monitoring of my own company website. Two birds with one stone.

STEP 0a - Register for a free Dynamic DNS address so that you can monitor the ever-changing IP address of your broadband. I use dyndns.org. I have done this long time ago, so this part is set up for me.

SET 0b - Get a home router with dynamic dns option. I use Linksys WRT54G and a DLINK DL-524. Detail on this later.

STEP 2 - Choose a free site monitoring tool:

The first one I found is SYSOJO. Which advertise itself on google. Looks very powerful. It monitors website (HTML), MySQL, and even PING. As I am looking for Ping monitoring, its good enough.

For free, I can set it to ping my home router every 10 minutes, and on 3 consecutive failures, email me. The 3 consecutive failure is important, it is inevitable that at some time

The second I will try is from the recommendations of WebDistortion. It recommends 5 "best uptime monitoring tool".

This will be an ongoing post...

What features should I compare?