Uptime
a server uptime monitoring system, provided as a service to the entire
Internet by ArsDigita
(in this case, the actual contributors were
Jin Choi, Philip
Greenspun).
What it does
Uptime periodically requests a page from your server. If the site is
unreachable, Uptime sends you email. Uptime will continue checking
your site. When it becomes reachable again, Uptime will send you one
more message.
If you wish to be beeped by Uptime, then you need only subscribe to a
beeper service that has an email gateway. You can give Uptime a
custom subject line or message body if your beeping service needs a
specially formatted message.
What's the period? Right now, the average user's server gets queried
every 15 minutes. We have "gold" and "silver" users who get
queried every two or five minutes. These are generally friends of
ours or people who help support this site in some way.
OK, I'm ready to start
Well, then just add a new url to the
system and take it from there. If you already added your site,
go and enter your email address or
look at the complete list of
sites registered in this system.
Underlying Technology
This is yet another example from the book Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. We wrote it in Tcl for the
NaviServer (AOL Server) API and the back-end is an Oracle 8 relational
database. The software is pretty simple. The hard part is keeping a
relational database up and running 7 days/week, 24 hours/day.
Uptime went into service on June 20, 1997. We changed the data model
slightly and moved it to a larger machine on December 1, 1998. In the
process, we kissed the logs goodbye.
uptime@alal.com