About website monitoring
Want a concrete example? Here you are: a customer tells me she is unable to select a payment method. It is hardly possible, but after a while I get the idea that the payment processing service might be offline. A quick look at the screen and, sure enough, that was the reason.
The result? I found the cause of the problem fast, the client stayed with my service and retried the transaction on the next day without any problems. Of course I could have built such a tool myself, but why? I would rather spend that time building my business.
- Daniel Owsiański, webankieta.pl
Did it ever happen to you to find out about problems by hearing about them from its users? Or perhaps you spent some time looking for problems with your software that were actually caused by problems with other sites? It happened to me and to my friends. That is why I created El Monito.
El Monito watches your websites 24 hours a day from different places and informs you about problems via email, with SMS notifications coming soon.
About the author
Elksoft is me, Marcin Kaszynski. I spend most of my time building software -- from design to coding to project management. My company website is here.
Colophon
El Monito would not be possible in its current form had I not used works of other people:
- Python is a great programming language with an extensive standard library that makes coding as quick and effortless as it gets.
- Django is a web framework for Python built by people who like jazz. Like me. But that is not the only reason I use it and advocate it to other developers.
- Twisted is a set of building blocks for software that needs to deal with lots of different things at more or less the same time. El Monito uses Twisted for the part that actually checks if your websites are online.
- pytz is a Python library for dealing with the timezone mess.
- The current looks is based on the GenericBlue template from the excellent Free CSS Templates website. The cacti and colors were created by Jan Klosowski (go see his comic, new page every week!).
So, I would like to sincerely thank all the people mentioned above :)
Need more information? Do not hesitate to ask!marcin@elksoft.pl.