Blogs: uptime is important
Blogs aren't just «personal diaries» any more. They are being used to generate income; thus blogging became a business. Just like any kind of business, blogging may suffer a lot if blogs become slow to response, cease to be available and exhibit a number of other undesirable traits.
It's hard to watch even a single blog if it comes to keeping it clean. A number of parameters should be within acceptable bounds: page loading speed, documents presence (no '404' errors) and so on. Blogger should be able to notice and moderate incoming comments and trackbacks, make sure the announces of new posts are spread through statusphere etc in time and so on and so forth.
Most of blog' status data may be obtained by calling a specially crafted URL (using GET method) or posting data to an URL (POST method). In other words, retrieving such data and analyzing those may serve as a good means of blog health monitoring.
If a blog experiences a problem, it must be identified and handled as soon as possible. Blog's downtime may cost very much, thus one should monitor all the data reflecting blog's status.
Monitoring: looking for an optimal tool
Network monitoring isn't a new idea; there are hundreds of tools, services and so on. The question is what to choose and why.
First, you could think of monitoring services such as mon.itor.us.
Pros: they often perform monitoring from a number of locations; they are often inexpensive or free; they are easy to set up.
Cons: these service often lack a number of useful features: variety of network protocols one could use; no convenient means of alerting (such as via SMS and/or Jabber messages). Also, if you need to monitor a restricted access data, you could have to grant access to such info to the service. It may be inappropriate.
Second, you could install server-side monitoring software, such as Nagios.
Pros: powerful, efficient; the functionality such software can often be extended using plug-ins and so on.
Cons: you require certain amount of knowledge in operating systems and related areas to install, run and troubleshoot such pieces of software. Also, such software often lack convenient user-interface.
Third, you can use desktop monitoring software such as IPHost Network Monitor.
Pros: desktop monitoring software is often easy to use and easy to understand. It can be extended using well-known monitoring products such as Nagios. Also, you could access restricted areas of your site by providing correct credentials to the configuration data of the monitored resources.
Cons: the piece of software must work as long as possible to gather good amount of service stats. Also, it can cause high CPU load and consume significant amount of RAM and disk memory.
Conclusion
No service/product is ideal, in fact. The optimal setup could make use of two or more of the mentioned choices
For example, if a network of server/services could supply their data to the desktop software, it could expand capabilities of both.
Until then, desktop implementation of network monitoring software seems the best option for the absolute majority of bloggers wishing to be notified first, when their blogs experience any problem.
