Why MSN as an alerting feature?

When doing a meeting with partners or prospects, a question I often get is why ServersCheck offers MSN as an alerting feature.

Monitoring becomes less more valuable in terms of ensuring business continuity if one cannot be notified when an issue is detected. Alerting allows the recipient to take whatever steps are required to resolve the problem.

For a monitoring software package being capable to alert is good. Fortunately for all of us I have yet to encounter the first monitoring software that has not alerting possibilities.

In a previous post I have explained the benefit of using SMS alerting as this option uses the phone network rather than the GSM network.

Other alert options offered by ServersCheck are email, MSN, netsend,... Why MSN?

Alerting is about trying to pass-on a message as quickly as possible to the end-user while trying to increase the possibilities that he will read the message fast.

Email used to be the eye-catcher causing people to jump to their mailboxes once a "You've Got Mail" sound rings. Due to the large amount of genuine emails (and SPAM) we receive, watching our mail box has become less of a concern.

MSN has the benefit that it displays a small box on the PC but morehowever that people are paying higer attention to instant messaging tools compared to other types of communication.

From our perspictive we have to try to catch the attention of the end-user. Simple studies have demonstrated us that next to mobile phone, MSN has the highest eye catcher and it's free

To setup MSN alerting you will need to Live Messenger accounts:
- one MSN account for sending the chat messages -> configured on server running our software
- LiveMessenger or similar on your PC to receive the msn messages from our software.

Signal Tower - A new visual alerting feature

With the release of 7.13 earlier this morning, we have introduced a new alerting hardware feature.

The 26cm tall signal tower enables to visually indicate the status of the monitoring tasks performed by the ServersCheck Monitoring Software.

The tower will either show a green, amber or red light. On failure it can also flash a red light to stress on the situation.

On top of that it can also generate an audible alert of 85dbs measured at 1m distance. This will ensure that detected failure will not get unnoticed.

The tower is available in 2 versions:
- CE Certified for the European Union with an European style power plug (220V)
- FCC Certified for the North American market with a 2 pin straight US power adapter (110V)

The towers are available for order. A 2-3 weeks lead time has to be taken into consideration.

Technical information on the Signal Tower can be found on following url:
http://www.serverscheck.com/hardware/signal-light-tower_phe-3fb.asp

ServersCheck in French Polynesia

Our company's strategy has been since inception is to take care of cultural differences. This resulted in having our software available in more than 30 languages, pretty unique in our market space.

We have a "Think Global, Act Local" approach. While having a standard solution almost world wide, different markets ask different approaches. Rather than opening offices in all countries of the world, we rather team up with local players in different markets.


Our market coverage is now almost world wide as through the partnership signed with 17s149w in French Polynesia, we are now represented in the Pacific region. This emphasis our believe in not only the traditional big markets where everyone is active but also the smaller markets.

I was quite surprised to hear that only one of the Big Three had a local presence in French Polynesia while speaking to a prospect. He was quite pleased to hear that ServersCheck took interest in this market as well and had partner with an innovative company like 17s149w.

You can visit our French Polynesian website at http://www.serverscheck.pf

Through our French Polynesian partner, all islands & countries in the Pacific can now turn them to a local contact that is able to assist them regarding the ServersCheck products.

Monitoring a website

A question we often get is: how do I monitor a website.

One has first to understand the different layers involved in a website and to what info he has access.

1. Hardware level:
A simple PING check will reveal if a server is alive or not. Monitor the response times as slower response times might indicate an error

2. OS level:
if you can then you can use the WindowsHealth or LinuxHealth check types to monitor the general health of the host running the site. This may help you to avoid situations like full dis, low memory resulting in a website failure.

3. Web server level:
A website runs on a machine, that hosts an Operating System and that has a web server. The site itself can be static or an application running as a layer on top of the web server.

A web server is typically monitored by using the TCP check to see if the server responds on the defined port (by default 80 or 443 for HTTPS)

4. Web application level:
The fastest check is to perform a HTTP HEADER check that verifies the header data sent back for a specific URL

The best option though is to use the HTTP check. It will load the given page and then scan the content to see if a predefined string is returned. If not, then an error is triggered.

You can also monitor the page download time; this is the time required to download the HTML - excluding images and any other embedded content.


Depending on your level access to your web site and server, you can define multiple layers of monitoring.


With ServersCheck you will know when your site fails before your customer(s) start calling you that there is an issue.