Information Gift

A Mouse to Watch Over Us

Want to be the first to know when your site is down? Wouldn't it be great to have a chance to address outages before your client or boss or customers find out about it?

If you are running Tiger (Mac OS X.4.x), WatchMouse provides a free website monitoring Dashboard widget that visits your website on a schedulable basis, graphs availability over the last 72 hours, and notifies you when reachability becomes a problem. Notification is via a pop-up browser window reporting resolve, connect and download times from up to 20 test servers worldwide.

WatchMouse hopes you'll like the free service so much that you'll spring for one of their advanced monitoring package subscriptions, offered in pricing tiers appropriate for smaller to corporate organizations.

Not on Tiger? You can still run availability spot checks as follows:

With WatchMouse's Check Host form, you can query the same servers used by the widget. For convenience, I've created a WatchMouse Check Host bookmarklet—just drag the WatchMouse Check Host link to your Bookmarks bar, navigate to a site to test, and click on the link to generate your report.

I find the above useful when a client complains about availability, and yet their site responds well from my end. If WatchMouse shows good connectivity from locations all over the world, then I can infer the problem is most likely localized to our client's connection.