Server uptime monitor through a desktop utility

If you have a website, the most important is to constant monitoring of server uptime to ensure 24/7 availability of the site. It ensures that your site visitor doesn't return disappointed from your site. To check availability of the site, either you can go to the site directly or can make use of some other third party website\tool in order to constantly monitor server uptime . With third party website or tool, you can check other important parameters, such as site speed or relative speed. However, you must acknowledge that we often forget to check this important factor.

Here, we will see how we can automate the entire process of checking the website availability. We will take help of a small utility called Net uptime monitor. Net uptime monitor is meant for testing your computer connection. We will slightly tweak this one to monitor uptime of server. Net uptime monitor records the exact time and length of the failures and log them accordingly.

You can download the utility from this link. This software is compatible with Windows Xp, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows server. Remember that you need to install it in your local computer and not in your website.

This utility basically checks your local internet speed by connecting to the three high performance servers at defined interval of time. We will change the three server names and IP with our websites name and IP. We can change the interval of monitoring as per our requirement. Now, when it will be up, it will try to connect to your websites and will show you the status. You can select from several sounds that will play when there is a connection error.

We can keep this utility running and get an alarm, whenever your website is down. The cost of this small utility is only $9.95. However, if you choose to download the trial version, the trial version closes after 30 minutes. In such case, you can make use of the Windows scheduler.

We can schedule the Net Uptime monitor, so that it runs at equal interval of time. For that, go to “Control panel à Administrative ToolàTask Scheduler”. On the right hand pane, click on create task. In the “Create Task” window, enter relevant details in General Tab. In the trigger tab, select “Daily” and check on “Repeat task every”. Now, click on the corresponding drop down box and select the required interval at which you want to run the application. Now, click on “for a duration of” drop down box to select the time period for which you want to monitor your website. Next, go to the Action Tab. Click on New and select “Start a New Program” from Action drop down box. Now click on browse and select C:\Program Files (x86)\Net Uptime Monitor\NetUptimeMonitor. The path may be slightly different based on your windows operating system and installation folder.

Now, when you click ok, it will schedule the Net uptime Monitor at your defined interval of time. After every 30 minutes, the application will close and the scheduler will again make it up (ensure that your scheduler duration is more than 30 minutes) and continuously monitor server uptime.