Monday, September 15, 2008

Download Pick: Servers Alive

Here is my download pick of the week.
There are all sorts of monitoring solutions out there for alerting you as to when a resource is not available but one of my favorites is a program called Servers Alive by a company called Woodstone.

The program allows you to monitor your servers on a web page as well as send out email alerts when a server goes down. We use it to ping our branch routers and notify us if they go down. There are a lot of free add ons to the product. It is very easy to set up using the programs graphical input screens.

Woodstone offers a free unlimited trial of Servers Alive you can download from here:

http://www.woodstone.nu/salive/index.asp

This product came in very handy for us last evening during powerful windstorms to let us know which branches we could expect to have problems with this morning.

To purchase the product it is reasonably priced under $500 US($199 euro) for the enterprise edition however the free edition works great!
Here is a sample ouput of our web page from servers alive.

Status of hosts at last check

Brecksville DOWN since 4:06:46 AM, 9/15/2008
Maple Heights DOWN since 4:06:44 AM, 9/15/2008
Olmsted Falls DOWN since 4:06:43 AM, 9/15/2008
Warrensville DOWN since 4:06:46 AM, 9/15/2008
Bay Village RUNNING since 4:06:12 AM, 9/15/2008

We basically created a disrtibution list email with all of our admins on it called Serversalive in exchange and set it so it will send out updates when our routers bounce up and down. Here is sample text:

Warrensville is DOWN (0%)

Mail generated by Woodstone Servers Alive at Monday, September 15, 2008 4:06:46 AM

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