Pingdom Desktop Notifier
Update: Pingdom does not support the company's own Desktop Notifier program anymore. You may want to try Desktop Notifier for Pingdom instead, an open source third-party application that offers the same feature set as the original.
Yesterday's giveaway - which actually is still running so hurry up if you have not already participated - consisted of Pingdom Basic accounts for one year that webmasters could win by leaving a comment on the Pingdom review page.
Pingdom is a website and server monitoring service that offers free accounts that are good for checking specific websites or service. The paid accounts at additional checks and are usually the way to go for professional webmasters and server administrators who want a reliable service that notifies them immediately once one of their websites, servers or services stops working.
Pingdom has recently released a desktop application that will display the status of all websites and servers that are monitored by a specific Pingdom account. The Pingdom notifier is currently only available for the Windows operating system. It will query the status of the Pingdom account regularly and notify the user if a check of a website, server or service failed. This can be handy depending on the notification settings of each service in the Pingdom account.
You might recall that Pingdom offers email, SMS, iPhone and Twitter notifications with SMS being limited to a specific number that can be raised by buying additional SMS packages. Not every web service, server or website will therefore be configured to notify the user by SMS if the service fails. The Pingdom desktop notifier is therefore mostly an additional option to monitor websites while working on the computer.
The notifier will display a popup on the computer desktop if one of the website checks fails. All options in the notifier lead directly to the Pingdom control panel on the Internet.
The Pingdom Desktop Notifier complements the other notification options. It might be useful in this regard but has the severe disadvantage that the webmaster needs to be in front of the computer to notice the notifications. The software program is available for download on the Pingdom website. It is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
