Network monitoring service - what should do?

Hello,

I think about a service for monitoring web services (http, pop, database etc) that is designed for business web sites owners. These kind of services exist, some are free, some are paid. I wonder what would such a service should manage to have a chance to succeed and that people were willing to pay for it?

[FONT=verdana]These are generally very useful services. I subscribe one of them, and no doubt others here do too.

Your problem is - as you pointed out - several such services already exist, and the market leaders are very well established. You would need to offer some unique features that the others don’t already have.

As for whether I would be willing to pay for it, the answer is simple: I’d be willing to pay for any useful service that offers value for money if the benefits justify the cost. Otherwise, I wouldn’t.

Mike[/FONT]

Hello Mike, thank you for your opinion. At this moment we’re looking for ideas to improve the service. We’re looking for some added value to users so they will have a reason to use our application :slight_smile:

[FONT=verdana]To answer that question, you’ve got to look at all the features offered by your competitors. Then offer those same features you think will be the most useful, plus any other useful features you can think of that your competitors are not offering.

Mike[/FONT]

Yes, we have done research about our competitors and their services. As I pointed out in my previous e-mail, we’re talking to real users to obtain from them useful tips and information what kind of services these established providers don’t offer and users need.

As you mentioned earlier, you use monitoring services for your website(s), what services do you use? Is there some missing functionality from your point of view?

This time we’re collection large number of these inputs and everything is important for us.

Hi user99808,

I currently use Nagios configured to report on all aspects of my internal web network. The way I have it configured is to alert me when important criteria is breached, like:

  • web server uptime
  • RAM leakage
  • Polls important services to ensure they respond.
  • Disk space
  • RAID integrity
  • interface states (up/down/idle)
  • latency polling
  • Apache error conditions
  • Database and Config Files Backup success
  • HTTP state
  • IMAP/POP/SMTP monitoring
  • Intrusion Detection/DOS routed from Firewall
  • Google Analytics Scrape to add to the reports we generate.
  • sftp monitoring (fires events based on intrution, flags high volume uploads)
  • Cluster State - reports if nodes are down
  • UPS condition and state

I probably forgot a few, but this is a fairly complete list. Nagios is free (open source). It is awful to configure so making such tools easy for users with good documentation would help.

As has been already mentioned, you have to dig to find out what makes your competitors successful. What dimensions make them successful; marketing, process, product, service, first in the market, and price?

Regards,
Steve

I’ve used pingdom just to monitor if/when a website goes down. It’s not nearly as comprehensive as the Nagios package ServerStorm recommend (which I might actually take a closer look at, btw), but if all you need is a simple notification when a website goes down, pingdom should work.