I-BLOG

One of the things every network admin would like to do is to monitor his key application servers/machines’ up status. If it is down, the last thing he wants is to have the users come to him and complain!

Say I own a web server and I want to see if the web server is alive and I’d like to know when the server goes down, one option is to keep an infinite ping loop and keep it outputting to a text file or so, then do a daily look through of the text file to see if it went down or not. Not an efficient way to handle things, as well this doesn’t ensure that you get notified the moment it goes down.

I did spend some time in Google. Well, there are thousands of networking monitoring applications that can do this, but they all come with $$$. I was searching for a rather freeware solution or write a script in Perl or something. Then I stumbled upon this one;

CheckHost by ab-tools.com just developed August 2009.

The tool has amazing capabilities. It does exactly what I wanted and even more. It can check to see if a HOST is alive by ping and when down, give a desktop alert or even send an email to you. Further more to the functionality, it can work on TCP and UDP as well.

So if you have a web server, it can check by actual TCP/80 connections, if you have a public facing RDP server – then check actual TCP/3389 and let you know immediately when it goes down. Check out the configuration options tab below;

This is technology at its best. Simple/low on resources yet still get things done. Wouldn’t people like an admin like this who is always get first to the issue.

Great going guys! Check out their website they have some more cool stuff under development as well.