What's the best free web app for monitoring multiple websites?

May 12, 2009 7:25 AM

What's a good, easily installed open-source web app for monitoring multiple web servers? I used to be a network admin and most of the tools I used for that racket seem way overkill for what I want to do here. Basically I just want to get alerts if a site goes down, and track some analytics of server uptime so I can complain to ISPs with some evidence to back me up.

PHP would be nice, since that'll run anywhere, with I figure a cron job that polls the servers at regular intervals? Thanks

posted by excitementMD to computers & internet (8 answers total)

Xymon, formerly Hobbit (ahh, trademark issues....) Not trivial to install, but not hard for basic setups, and very good.
posted by eriko at 7:31 AM on May 12, 2009

I can think of Munin, I only used it once, but it may be the thing you are looking for. It was relatively straightforward to set up.

From the Munin website:

Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, applications, weather measurements and whatever comes to mind. It makes it easy to determine "what's different today" when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you're doing capacity-wise on any resources.

posted by soroush at 8:14 AM on May 12, 2009

Does it have to be something you run yourself? Perhaps http://aremysitesup.com/ will do what you need?

There's a paid membership, and I haven't used it, so I'm not sure what the differences are - but hopefully it will do what you need.
posted by backwards guitar at 8:37 AM on May 12, 2009

Mon will do your alerting for you.
Cacti will probably do all you need with graphs and whatnot.
posted by namewithoutwords at 8:54 AM on May 12, 2009

I use SiteUptime. You can track a single website for free, 3 for $5/month and 6 for $10/month. Seemed pretty reasonable to me.
posted by purephase at 9:21 AM on May 12, 2009

mon or nagios.
posted by rmd1023 at 10:09 AM on May 12, 2009

nagios
posted by devnull at 10:51 AM on May 12, 2009

The benefits of outsourcing this are that

a) If your whole network goes down, so will your network monitoring software (so how will it reach out to you?)

b) If you have it on a separate network and that network goes down... you get the idea.

c) If the monitoring service can't connect, how do you know it's not something between the two networks?

I've had good success with the Alertra service, but if you don't need the above, then it may be overkill for you.

Last time I checked there's a 1 month trial.
posted by MesoFilter at 9:02 PM on May 12, 2009