What is server monitoring service?

When you run a website or more complicated internet service, reliability comes to the first plan. Even if you provide perfect content, incredible service or anything else people like, it costs nothing if visitors cannot reach it.

Behind the scenes, the Internet has a very complex structure that can be imagined like a pyramid:

Network - your website is located on a particular computer somewhere in the Internet, it connects to other computers including visitors' via a network.
Hardware server - that particular computer where your website resides
Software server - computer program running on a hardware server accepting visitors requests and giving away content, there are many servers and the most popular is web server, however you may heard of ftp server, ssh server, mail server, telnet server, and so on.
Application - your unique content: website, blog, service, photo gallery, files - the things you share to the visitors.

If failure happens on any of the levels, your visitors do not get content, or get it broken. There are many reasons failure can happen, just few live examples:

during hardware upgrade, engineers forgot to connect cable connecting datacenter to Canada, this caused Canadian visitors unable to reach websites hosted in this data center.
hardware server was out of free disk space, and database stopped working.
mail server stopped responding due to a big number of spam messages received
content manager uploaded wrong web page.

In case you do not get know about failures quickly, you loose visitors, customers and money.

It is impossible to run failure-free service due to a nature of the Internet and technology complexity, but it is possible to get notified if something goes wrong and fix it as soon as possible.

Almost all data centers invest into monitoring of their network and hardware, they provide close to 100% uptime. But you must know, they monitor network and low-level hardware only. Their primary goal is to provide you with powered-on hardware connected to the Internet, and they do this well though. Everything else relies on you. It is your job to make sure your web server is up and returns no errors. Fortunately, this complex job can be delegated to third-party server monitoring services.

Server monitoring services like www.UptimeInspector.com intented to test targets (web servers, file servers, mail servers and so on) from the different parts of the world providing resource owners with instant alerts on failures.

UptimeInspector is designed to be the most feature-rich server monitoring service, it can monitor almost all types of servers (HTTP, SMTP, POP3, SSH, FTP, MySQL, custom port) and send out notification messages by SMS, e-mail, instant messaging, RSS, and even a phone call. Each target is monitored from several locations around the world.

^{Each target is monitored from several nodes around the world}

With UptimeInspector there are many monitoring scenarios you can set up:

monitor website, get SMS alert if it becomes unreachable;
monitor mail server, get SMS and AIM alert if it becomes unreachable or respond slowly;
monitor downloadable file, get e-mail alert if it was modified;
monitor website, review weekly response time reports;
monitor office router, get alert if it hangs;
monitor your website position in Google, get alert if it goes up or down;
check your website for broken links
and many more

Depending on importance of monitoring task, it is possible to choose the number of nodes to monitor from, monitoring interval, persons to notify and other options.

Whether you already use server monitoring service or do not use yet, you should try UptimeInspector, 14-days trial is available for free and you can test it before making the decision.