Pundits will tell you it's not an option not to monitor

Being a pundit for many years at my own Garnet Chaney dot com, I certainly will encourage you to monitor your websites, even if you don't choose to try my Server Monitor program.

FAST FACT: "Slow Websites Cost $25 Billion in Lost Sales! ... This includes more than $21 billion per year lost when users abandon a website because of excessive delays in web page downloads." according to Zona Research.

There are other options. For example, you could invest in expensive software to monitor your website, such as HP's sitescope software. (Hint: It's so expensive, they won't even tell you the cost on their website!)

If you're depending on your internet store to produce millions of dollar in revenue each month, it's probably worth the thousands of dollars of investment in software and dedicated hardware. But if you're just playing the Adsense and Amazon affiliate game, and trying to make a little toy money on the side, you'll probably not be tempted to invest your hard earned toy dollars in enterprise server monitoring software.

What if you don't need instant notification of problems?

One of the nice aspects of a professional monitoring service is that some of them will track the performance of your website over time. And they are usually well connected to the internet, and they'll notify you any time, day or night, when one of your sites goes offline. But if you're playing the adsense game, you might not want to drop everything you are doing to fix a $2 website the instant it breaks. It might be fine to just wait until the weekend to fix the site. The only problem is that the notifications from the service will just pile up in your inbox. These notifications can cost you money if you are charged per instant notification, or SMS, as is done on the Sprint cellular network.

In the interests of frugality, I only end up monitoring my most important servers, and the websites of my most important clients. I don't even bother monitoring all the free websites I've setup over the years, but it would be nice to know if they are still around or not.

A personal website monitoring and server monitoring tool?

So what about a peronal server monitoring tool? What if I just want to take a quick glance at a bunch of my websites? Something that I can occassionally run from where ever I am, and see how my websites are responding in real time on a real internet connection? What if you have access to the internet through a variety of connections, such as wifi, dsl, cable, and cellular, and you'd like to quickly test the response time of a lot of your website from each of these internet connections? What about being able to compare the response time of some big well known websites like CNN, Google, or Yahoo, to the response time of your own website over whatever real internet connection you are using?

Now you understand my motivation to write ServerMonitor. It is a simple monitoring tool written for Adobe AIR platform, so it will run on Windowsm Macs, Adobe AIR for Linux (Alpha), and eventually mobile devices too. Adobe is putting a lot of investment into the AIR platform to make it ubiquitous across different systems. By writing this app to run on AIR, I get the benefit of that investment.

I can run this Server Monitor whenever I have time to do a checkup on the hundreds of domains that I own, and I have some time to fix any problems I might find.

Will I add more features to my server monitoring software?

Eventually I hope to add lots of cool features like:

• website response time history
• graphs of performance
• periodic monitoring
• making sure certan text is in the response from each site
• email or SMS notifications
• spidering validation
• scripting
• ability to put the program on a home computer and have it automatically monitor all my web assets
• dns detective
• advanced failure analysis

But for now this tool just gives a simple list of websites which you can edit to add your own sites, and a Check button to start checking the list. It uses the built in AIR web browser to browse your list of sites, and tabulates the response time of each.

Get Your Copy Today

Free Website Monitoring Software

Right now the tool is a free download. Eventually as I put more features in the tool, it will probably become a for pay program. But it's here for free now for you to enjoy. Please take the time to respond with a comment about the program.

• Download Web Site And Server Monitor

Instructions

Check out the Instructions

Version History

Check out the Version History.

To-Do List

• Upload the latest version with some extra goodies like double clicking to create new entries in the website list
• Upload to the Adobe Exchange
• Find a solution to the issue of using a self-signed certificate that doesn't involve spending $300 to sign my free programs. (I already admitted I'm frugal.)

Other keywords:

• remote monitoring service
• server monitoring
• website monitoring
• web server webserver downtime maintenance remote service performance alert Internet devices servers E-mail page transaction Network Test Tools moniter

Disclaimers and Disclosures

Adobe has been one of my clients since 2006. Nothing I say here is any kind of official statement on behalf of Adobe. Writing this app was a practical way to learn more about Flex and Air. Server Monitor was written using Flex Builder Professional. You can try Flex Builder 3.

Some trademarks such as Adobe and AIR are owned by Adobe Systems, Inc..
This wiki space may refer to other trademarks that are owned by their respective owners.