Server Monitoring With Observu

One of the things that webmasters need to keep an eye on at all times is the state of their website. Websites may go down, for instance because of hardware failures, hacks or too much traffic. This often happens at times when you may not be at your computer to notice what is going on the minute it is happening. If you are sound asleep, you may notice it hours after the incident which is not good for business or reputation. Server monitoring software steps in and monitors a server around the clock so that this does not have to be done manually.

I have already covered the server monitoring service that I'm using to monitor sites like Ghacks and other websites which offered various packages depending on the amount of servers / websites and response times that you demanded.

Observu is another server monitoring service and it is probably the most basic one that I have ever seen. Users register by entering an email address and password and can log into the website immediately.

The only interaction that is offered is to add a new server to monitor or edit / delete previous entries that are already monitored.

Adding a new website for server monitoring requires minimal user input. Just enter the url of the site and a text that usually appears on it. If that text does not appear during checks an email will be send to the email account of the user.

This limits Observu obviously. It can only detect if a text on a website is not shown anymore. You could write your own script that checks the various services running on your server but that's probably not what this basic server monitoring service is all about.

It's great for webmasters who run static pages or pages that rely on MySQL but anything beyond that is more or less out of reach of the server monitoring service.

Update: The recent version of Observu uses an agent, currently only available for Linux, that monitors the server. It also appears that the product will no longer be free anymore once it leaves beta.

Advertisement