Recommend an automatic web application availiblity checker [closed]

Question

I am looking for a piece of software that I can schedule to check that our web apps are up and running. I've used HP open view years ago, but remember it being quite expensive, I'm looking for something open source or cheap.

So it would login in and do some simple actions maybe submit form and check for some text on screen that means the web app is running ok and then email me if the website is down.

I could create a test using the Selenium IDE, and automate it with an Ant script but looking for a more streamlined solution that a non programming could use.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Scotty

Answer 1

Decided on site24x7 does login and has a rest api to call to get stats - site24x7.com/index.html

Answer 2

For ASP.Net apps, .Net 2.0 introduced enhanced Health Monitoring to do what you want, as well as handle a wide variety of app events. It can log to the database, event log, or other logs, and can perform noticiation such as sending email.

I realize that you are probably not talking about an ASP.Net app. I'm just adding this reply for others who read this question who may be using (or considering) that platform.

Answer 3

You can use cron to perform the tests. Cron will run the tests after a specified amount of time such as once per hour.

Cron is available in Linux but there are Windows alternatives which you can download. Or you can use Windows' task scheduler.

Answer 4

Would something like mon.itor.us do?

Answer 5

It sounds like Nagios is what you're looking for:

http://www.nagios.org/

Answer 6

I don't believe they can do the actual login, but they can check for content etc, I have used Pingdom.com before with good success.

Answer 7

did you find any right tool? We have used "htmlunit" library to build on our own! think of building your own tool based on such library.