Finally, we are finished with our new network monitoring tool. AliveMon monitors routers and server (well, everything with an IP stack ;)) and lets you know when they are in trouble. It can do ping based-checks but also the more reliable application specific checks. For example, it talks http to a web server. I was insistent on these app-specific probes because I’ve often seen situations where a simple ping probe told you “all well” where the web server was already died. As an extra bonus, it also supports UDP monitoring for game servers, which, as my frieds have told me, is a great feature (did I mention I am too old-fashioned to see the greatness in it… ;)).
OK, so it is a nice tool – but why the heck I am talking in my syslog blog about it? Well, as one of its alerting actions, it supports sending syslog messages. This is cool, as it allows you to integrate server availability monitoring into your central syslog backend.
AliveMon is part of the Windows product line, but it is free for monitoring a single server. This is thanks to my “game server friend” who insisted this might be a nice incident for his folks ;) Those with more than a single server are expected to pay a reasonable fee. As my fried said: “those with money for many servers my also want to fund development a little”. I guess this was said rightly ;)