Website health checks are a crucial service to an operations team. In addition to in-house monitoring and service state reporting it’s also important, even critical, to have an impartial third party to run checks to test your customer facing services. There are a lot of companies in this arean that would be glad to have your business, so after some cursory reviews of the offerings from Gomez, Pingdom, WebMetrics, Monitis, and others, we’ve settled on Pingdom. The choice was simple because of the combination of wide range of monitoring features and associated price. In keeping with the common method of grabbing potential business they  offer a 30 day trial of their services and a discount on full-year payment vs monthly. Check them out here: http://www.pingdom.com/services/ – I’m not sure if their site runs MySQL for the backend metrics tracking but I like to think that they do.

You can see some of our public reports here:

• Kontrollbase demo server uptime and response time widgets (scroll down the page): http://kontrollsoft.com/software-kontrollbase
• Public reports for our various operational services: http://www.pingdom.com/reports/d9sps0m4stde/
• Check back for another report that will check services via POST data to the demo server.