Wondering what the best tools for notifications are. Specifically, something to monitor the server and the site to make sure its up. What do people use? Is it best to use a built-in notification tool on the server for the site uptime monitoring?
It's run by a friend of ours who used to work at Sitepoint and was frustrated by the limited options for good, affordable, distributed monitoring. He's been running it for over 2 years and is growing fast.
It's a great service and recommended as a YC-style startup worth supporting.
To monitor more than uptime and service availability, the high end of this is automated performance measurement analysis by Keynote Systems (keynote.com). They have a lower end product called http://redalert.com/ (formerly its own service) which is comparable to pingdom.
I've used nagios and before that, ganglia for some monitoring. I've been looking into cacti lately for monitoring qmail message status and an asterisk installation for the number of active channels.
Many of these systems use rrdtool and even though I've used that tool directly before, with Cacti at least its a bit tricky to get familiar with the way the gui and the different templates are interconnected. The look and feel sure does seem polished though.
Wow, thanks for all the great feedback. We're going to try Pingdom first. I also liked nagios for its ability to restart services automatically - very cool.
If anyone wants an invite to NewsCred, shoot me a mail: shafqat at newscred.com. Its not much, but thought I should say thanks!
GroundWork (http://www.groundworkopensource.com/). It uses Nagios under the hood, but I wouldn't want to set up Nagios by hand (without the GroundWork config tools) at a largish site like ours.
Monit! Highly recommended. You can easily set it up to monitor local daemons, watch disk space, memory, external systems and more. Monit can also restart failing daemons.
Pingdom and Alertra. Alertra has had a perfect record for us for three years, meaning no false reports over that time (as far as we can tell). A bit more expensive, we use a single Alertra alert and multiple Pingdom alerts.
It's run by a friend of ours who used to work at Sitepoint and was frustrated by the limited options for good, affordable, distributed monitoring. He's been running it for over 2 years and is growing fast.
It's a great service and recommended as a YC-style startup worth supporting.