Ask HN: best/most popular hosted server monitoring services?

[mmelin]

I'd like to hear your suggestions for reputable, fairly large server monitoring services. The kind where they'll send you an alert if/when a service or server goes down, for a fee in the range of $20-100 per month. If you know an approximate number of customers your suggestion has, that would be great, since the major thing for me with these kinds of services is that most are too anonymous and hard to trust, since these kinds of businesses are relatively cheap and easy to set up in your parents' basement. I'm not interested in installed software, since I'm not at the scale needed to set up my own independent monitoring infrastructure.

I appreciate any ideas or suggestions. Thanks!

[aaroneous]

We've been very happy with pingdom.com. Plans range from $10-$35, they have a lot of options to verify your machines are actually up (APIs, ping, string matching, https, etc).

[mmelin → aaroneous]

Yeah, Pingdom is nice, I've actually used their free alternative GIGRIB for personal use and worked at a company who used their Business account. I'd like some more alternatives though. Thanks!

[run4yourlives]

This was the first result in google for "uptime monitoring": www.uptimesoftware.com

Given that they have a free plan, why don't you just sign up and see how reliable they are for your self prior to buying?

[mmelin → run4yourlives]

Well, the thing with monitoring software is that I'd really like to have a reasonable level of comfort with my choice before starting to use something, since the only time you need the service to be rock solid is when the faeces hits the rotating blades, so to speak.

edit: also, after looking at the site, that's downloaded software, which requires me to set up trustworthy infrastructure myself.

[run4yourlives → mmelin]

Is it really? yuck. When I saw this post, I thought this would be reasonably simple... After all, all you need is something to ping/hit the webserver and report when it can't.

To be honest, you can't account for every possible situation. Sometimes murphy's law applies. But if you can find a service that at least lets you know when it's hitting your server historically in some way, you should purchase it and get on to worrying about other things. If the company doesn't perform, you can deal with that issue at that time.