On Message with Ben Gross

Pingdom is a web-based uptime monitoring service that is inexpensive and straightforward to set up. Pingdom offers continuous monitoring of the availability of your online services, notification of failures, notification of service resumption and analytics for availability data. Both email and SMS notifications are available.

The service supports checking HTTP, HTTPS, ping, SMTP, POP and IMAP as well as arbitrary TCP and UDP ports. The service can authenticate against password protected web pages as well as send and expect strings for each port checked. Pingdom maintains a distributed set of machines in order to conduct tests from multiple points on the network.

Pingdom supports time resolutions of 1, 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60 minute for checks. As with all monitoring services, there is a tradeoff between the resolution of availability checks and the likelihood of spurious notifications. Services that have monitoring requirements for sub-minute checks would be advised to invest in their own monitoring infrastructure or investigate services that specialize in that kind of uptime monitoring.

Pingdom provides an option for public reports. Service providers can opt to publish their reports publicly report on the heath of their service. One interesting point to keep in mind is that these could be any services, even those of your competitors. Pingdom reports include information on both uptime and response time. Depending on the details of the contract, I believe Pingdom could be used to verify and make claims from a network service provider’s SLA. The Pingdom Web service API is available to subscribers who wish to either integrate Pingdom data into a custom application or web site.

Royal Pingdom is the company’s blog which regularly has interesting content about availability issues around the internet and network management issues.

Pingdom is priced at $10 a month for monitoring five individual services and 20 included SMS messages and $40 a month for thirty services and 200 SMS messages. Additional SMS message blocks are available and addition checks are $0.50 a month. Pingdom is inexpensive for business use, however it’s likely too expensive for most personal use. After several months as a subscriber to the service, I can recommend it.