online internet service and website monitoring and check comparison

I need a monitoring service which is constantly checking the services of mine which I offer to my clients. I want to be the first who knows about an outage or a problem as I absolutely hate it to be notified by one of my clients! As it turns out, it is quite a challenge to find the right service provider for this. Therefore, i decided to compile the facts I found and issue a post about this topic!

I will not go down the road for self running monitoring services like nagios or cacti and so on. I’ve been there, there are good and bad things about all of these tools but at the end of the day or are bothering too much with details and configurations false alerts and flapping states of services and so on…it’s really hard to keep the configuration of these utils up to date and you are the only one who can change it due to the lack of fancy web-configuration interfaces and reporting and so on. So please bare with me, this is NOT about those possibilities! Maybe someone else could come up with a post or a comparision of such tools!?

I wanted to go for a nice and fancy online monitoring tool. Something which is easy to configure and maintain, browser based configurations and reporting as well as email and sms notifications out of the box!

First of all, there is website checking and there is service monitoring. If you want to get informed as soon as a smtp service stops, your ftp server goes down or if you even have some services operating on non-standard ports, you need to look for a service monitoring. If you just want a website check to make sure that your website is running and responding with whatever content, you might want to go for website monitoring only which basically checks just if your website can be (down-)loaded. Depending on your services, you might want to monitor certain DNS entries, check the validity of your SSL Certificates, perform a content comparison of the content of a specific website and maybe even check whether your mail exchanger is listed on any DNS Blackhole List!

Second, you might be interested in multiple locations (ideally, spread over all continents) that check the availability and response times of your services or website, if you have visitors from other corners of the world. If you have regional/local visitors or consumers only, you probably should look for a local/regional monitoring service instead of a global service provider. Don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of monitoring locations offered though! Not the number of locations is important but the coverage and reliability. With 3-5 locations (one per continent – North America, South America, Europe, Afrika?, Asia/Pacific, Austriala) you should be more than happy! Having 10+ locations all at the same place does not add any value (but even costs sometimes)!

Third, do you want to be informed as soon as possible if something goes wrong or do you just want to know whether your hosting company had an outage you did not recognize by yourself? If you have money involved and an outage means loss to you, then you surely want your staff to be notified asap to fix the issue. This means you want your service to be monitored with an interval as short as possible (let’s say every minute). Most of the monitoring service providers will charge you more the more often you want your services to be monitored!

Forth, the supported channels of alerting and notifications. While I could not find a provider which is not supporting email alerts ;-), SMS is rather expensive or not supported!

Last, there are different reporting capabilities you might want to consider while evaluating. Website availability or performance reports as well as the history of service outages are important things which could help you prove your customers or your boss that you achieved your availability targets (99,98%) and so on! Is export of your desired format possible to keep historical data? How long is performance data kept and available to you? Do you like the look of the reports and graphs?

I listed the cheapest http check I could find, the most frequent http check plus a real world scenario. The real world scenario I came up with consists of the following monitoring requirements which i thought is realistic and would be provided by most of the monitoring solutions!
Real World Scenario: 3 Servers(Hosts/IPs), each running 3 Services (1 x http, 1 x https ,1 x ftp if available – if not available 3 x http) and monitoring from 3 locations (if available – if not available from as many as available). Regarding the SMS notifications, i judged the capability to send SMS worldwide not only regional and not via email@whateverprovider as not all providers support this, and it can be achieved by the email functionality itself.

By the way: I am not affiliated with any of the providers compared below and i have absolutely no knowledge about their reliability or customer service whatsoever! I just used the informations I found on their websites to file this comparison table! Please use the comment section below to share your thoughts!!!

So let’s take a look at the monitoring or checking capabilities first!

Let me add some remarks regarding the comparison table:

• In case of “some” within the dns column – this means, a basic hostname/ip lookup is performed, but no real dns queries like CNAME, SOA, A, MX, etc. sometimes a domain expiry date is checked as well.
• In case of “some” within the tcp column – this means, some static ports are available for checking like FTP, SMTP, IMAP, etc. but no custom ports can be defined. “ftp” means that obviously only FTP is supported
• In case of “some” within the content check column – that means, that just one single word or other limited comparison is supported. In case of “?” – I just couldn’t find an answer on the providers website!

Now, let’s take a look on the amount of locations and the notification/alerting channels supported and the SMS costs!

Remarks:

• In case of “some” within the sms column – target countries not clear or unclear offer!

Last, the pricing!

Remarks:

• A free service is not a trial to me and therefore I did not list such!

Please leave feedback, if you know any more online internet website or service monitoring providers which I did not consider or with any other feedback or information which is missing! Thank you!