Wormly Website Monitoring
A while ago I started adjusting my business a little bit to add more redundancy and to be better prepared for disaster. Disaster recovery is a biggy every business owner should have on his/her mind. Earlier this year I signed up for an external backup service and now my money making sites get a weekly off-site backup. In case my servers blow up completely I will then be able to restore my sites within a very short time-frame. Let a tornado ripp the data center into pieces (god forbidd) and my data is safe in a different part of the country.
Now I am currently test-driving an external website monitoring service to stay informed about the status of my server. Why? About 2 weeks ago a heavy thunderstorm with tornadoes caused a power outage for the data center my servers are in. The data center continued to run on generator power until a main breaker blew up and my server lost power. At the same time the data center monitoring solution apparently failed, too. I found out about the problem way after it happened and I was not happy. So, I was already sold on an external monitoring solution just hadn’t decided yet. A few days ago I was recommended to an external monitoring service provider and decided to give it a try. The timing seemed to be right as well as the price. And if you’re not convinced, there is always a free trial. The service I am currently experimenting with is called "Wormly" and is located at "Wormly Website Monitoring". Wormly is an Australia-based company founded in 2005 by Julian Szemere.
What can Wormly Server Monitoring do for you?
Several website monitoring and web server monitoring sensors are available. HTTP, PING, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, FTP, TCP, and DNS are the main options. You can also choose between different monitoring intervals and that way configure a rock solid uptime monitoring package for your needs. Even the smallest package comes loaded with features that would cost me extra $$$ somewhere else. The monitoring service uses a minimum of 4 locations world-wide to verify your server/website status before alerting you. And the alert notifications can be send via Email, SMS, or Instant Messaging as an example. Here is what I will now call the "Wormly Difference". Wormly offers to monitor your servers health, too. You upload a small agent file (PHP based), point the control panel to the location on your server and within 10 minutes or less you see performance charts being populated.
Well, it looked great from the outside and I was eager to get started and give this service a real life test. I have to say – it does not happen often that I am sold on a product within minutes after using it. But the Wormly Web Monitoring Service has blown away all my initial doubts and concerns about their service and what I should expect for the low advertised price. The control panel interface is simple and extremely effective in providing straight forward functionality. It works lightning fast and best of all – I did not need to even consider reading any documentation upfront. This web interface is very straight forward and extremely easy to use – even for a beginner. Within in 5 minutes I had my first server configured for monitoring and alerts where setup to notify me on my cell phone and external email. Alerting was tested and different layers for the alerts were defined.
With the configuration done so quickly and everything working right out of the box I suddenly had plenty of time available to look at the performance graphing in details. Some of the graphs provide short-term benefits while others can help me a lot in my long-term planning. Is my box low on memory and paging a lot – I can now easily see all necessary information and even export it. Awesome.
Even though I thought I would have everything under control, I decided to take a look at the help files and documentation and I am glad I did. Wormly did a great job compiling an extensive list of documents filled with information. I work in Information Technology for almost 10 years and I am doing web hosting since 1999 and I think I know a lot, but there were quite a few gems documented that helped me to get a better understanding of how to get the best out of the monitoring service that I eventually would have missed otherwise. A beginner does not have to be afraid of not understanding specific terminology or what does a specific feature do. The help files take will care of these concerns. And if that is not sufficient there is always support available.
I hope you can feel a little bit of how excited I am using the Wormly web server monitoring service. I think I was not sure what to expect, but I can say for sure that I am very impressed with Wormly at this point. Monitoring itself is good – it’s awesome if the service you use, offers an easy to use interface, great features and great prices. If you are in the market for web server monitoring, this is definitely something worth checking out. www.wormly.com
Control panel screenshots:
Main Page Wormly Control Panel – Bigger Screenshot click here
Wormly Monitoring Section – Bigger Screenshot click here
Wormly Server Graphing – Bigger Screenshot click here.
Website Availability Report – Bigger Screenshot click here.
Alert Notifications – Bigger Screenshot click here.
Wormly Help Section – Bigger Screenshot click here.
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