Website Monitor Service
October 23st 2003
John Lien

I built a little piece of software to watch websites, and ensure someone is notified if they are down. This software has a configuration file thats XML format and you can specify multiple websites, multiple email addresses, custom error messages to scan for in the page, etc.

It does not use DNS lookup on domains, but uses IPs you place in the config file. This way you can very easily check internal, and external testing sites that are not part of the normal internet.

Make sure you dont set the timer too low ( like 10 miliseconds) or if your website goes down you will get innundated with E-mails. Currently it does not notice that it has reported a website down, and not report it again for X number of minutes, I am planning on adding features like this if the software is used outside of what I built it for, or the community asks for it.

If you have any comments please let me know, would love to hear about anyones trials and tribulations with this software.

You will need to have the 1.1 version of the .NET framework installed for it to work out of the box. If you have 1.0 it will still work, but you will need to edit the install and uninstall vbs files included with the software and modify it to register the service under your version of .NET as I havent put the logic in those yet to detect the versions of .NET and properly handle it (yet!).

Download now here (115k)!