Not "Supported" by IT
Rolling your own web server monitor tool can prove inflexible. IT may not officially recognize that it exists. In my case, my homegrown tool resides on my personal account. Nobody else can access it or change settings.
No Error Checking
My tool simply checks for the existence of a content keyword and shoots off an email if it's not found. If my personal web host experiences a hiccup with connectivity, the script might send emails for every URL in the config file. Technicians are less likely to respond quickly to a system that "cries wolf" frequently.
Poor Reporting
The script saves its results to a daily log file, but I have not built any reporting features. Creating a simple report to demonstrate uptime for a particular URL would require parsing hundreds of files. The data should really reside in a database, but I'm not going to put effort into it when the market is saturated with tools. I have used monitoring tools in our internal environment to demonstrate hardware bottlenecks. A simple response time graph clearly demonstrates to a manager (or a server admin who's in denial) the user experience over time. A picture is worth ... a helluva lot of my time trying to convince people that I'm right. :)
The goal of this site is to document the process as I identify the best tool for my company's environment. Hopefully, you will find the results useful for your needs.
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