Sites are important
The more you are involved into Web presence, the more important are sites you maintain.
The exact type and function of site(s) isn't important. They all must be available all the time, and the more complex they are, the harder is to keep tracks of their state.
Even if you keep a blog, run under the ubiquitous Wordpress (or any other engine), there are many things to watch.
All the pages must be available, they should load quickly.
There should be no unmoderated comments: when visitors spot definite spam comments, they may leave your blog for good.
And so on and so forth. What is the easiest means to make sure the site is available?
Monitoring tools
There are dozens of monitoring tools. You might have heard about Nagios, or any other common tools. The only problem is these tools require your deep knowledge of operating system intrinsics. And those developed for broader audience should be powerful and multifunctional ones. This is why I offer you to test IPHost Network Monitor.
OK, now you have a tool at hand. What shall you check?
Special pages for special cases
The obvious solution is to load a page — say, a start page, to make sure it works.
However, it is not the best possible solution.
Monitoring assumes the page is checked on a regular basis. Important resources should be checked often. If a site is complex and updated many times a day, very such check means wasting resources of the server.
If you run several instances of a monitoring tool, to ensure the connectivity is checked as well, the load will grow respectively.
One of solution is to load a blank — or at least a static page. However, that will tell your monitor nothing about all the other subsystems. On a properly set up site there are many services that should be available: DBS, email system, Web services and all its components. Perhaps many other services as well. Loading blank page won't tell you if your site feels well.
The best solution in such a case is to make a special page, displaying short, but essential information about all the subsystems. It can be generated by a standalone process that checks the health of all the site's components and displays an easily understandable string, In such a case all you need to do is to find that string in the page loaded. And the page itself might be very small.
Do you have your own solutions for this tak? How would you make sure the site works fine?
