Website Monitoring Scripts

Every webmaster wants to be notified if a site they run has problems, a website monitoring script is one solution to this problem. Here we discusses some of the pro's and con's. Website monitoring scripts have these advantages :-
Custom Built
Scripts can test hard to reach pages, test all your back end systems, and simulate functionality unique to your site.
Cheap
After the script is written it is inexpensive to run it periodically.
Website monitoring scripts have disadvantages :-
Hosted Internally
Hosted within the organization the script won't detect problems that an external script would (such as a proxy server being down).
Re-inventing the wheel
Scripting techniques such as form filling, link clicking, are needed by all monitoring scripts.
Standard
The scripts are not using standard patterns and documentation and can be difficult to maintain in the future.
There are a number of hosted solutions on the market to monitor websites, few of them offer full scripting capabilities. Jiploo offers
  1. An easy to learn API
  2. The full power of a programming language
  3. High availability
Jiploo is a middle ground between scripting and hosted, website monitoring.
Posted on Monday, Dec 5, 2005