Best tools/practices for active and passive monitoring for a service/api

Question

I have a running service where I would like to instrument it with active/passive monitoring.

The service/api is written in c# -

1. Are there any tools that I can use to write/do active monitoring (i.e. a call to the service then verify the expected result)?

2. Are there any good tools to instrument the code so that it records when something "bad" happens - i.e. an exception is thrown or the processing time is very high?

It would be great if there were some tools to capture this data and do alerting off of it. I am sure they exist and would like to see what this community would recommend.

Answer 1

We are using Nagios http://nagios.org for monitoring for Webservices coded in C#. You can also check New Relic http://newrelic.com