West Wind Web Monitor
Who's watching your Web Site?

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Need to keep an eye on your Web site? Worried that your site might not be up and running returning accurate results? How much is it costing you if your site is down or not responding properly? Can you afford not to monitor your site?

West Wind Web Monitor is the tool for you. Web Monitor can help you monitor any number of Web site links to make sure they are still live and kicking, and more importantly, returning the results you actually expect. Web Monitor can watch an unlimited number of  Web site Urls and notify you via email or pager if and when there is a problem. It can even launch another URL or execute a file to correct the problem without manual intervention when a failure occurs. And Web Monitor  also notifies you again once the site comes back up, so that you can relax and back off from full panic mode at 3am in the morning.

Web Monitor runs either as a desktop application, taskbar item or as a Windows Service and allows you to monitor up to 100 sites per instance. The Service Version also provides a remote Web interface to administer the Web Monitor Service over the Web (requires Internet Information Services and ASP.NET 2.0).

West Wind Web Monitor Features:

Web Site Monitoring

• Monitor any number of Web sites simultaneously
• Monitor HTTP result for a specific string contained in result
• Search for result text or missing result text with plain text or RegEx expressions
• Configure each site individually including messages, actions and check frequency
• Recheck sites before failing to avoid false positives
• Send POST data to the server if needed
• Support for HTTP Authentication and SSL
• Monitor sites once every few seconds or once a day - it's up to you
• Hit maintenance links at regular intervals to perform automated Web tasks

Failure Notification and Recovery Processing

• Send email in response to failures
• Unlimited number of recipients are supported.
• Execute one or two Web Links or Executables in response to a failure.
• Detects site reactivation and send notification of reactivation.
• Full Add-In model using any .NET language allows customization
  of the entire process, including HTTP access, searching content,
  emailing, logging and execution of executables.

Administration

• Logging of failure and restart events
• Log files store data in XML format for external Log parsing
• Four operational modes:
  • Desktop Operation
  • Task Tray Operation
  • Windows Service Operation (Service Version)
• ASP.NET Web Front end to administer Web Monitor remotely

Extensibility

• Add-in support lets you extend Web Monitor with any .NET Language
• Customizable and pluggable .NET C# source code version available
  to plug Web Monitor functionality into your own .NET applications.

Want more information? Take a look at the online documentation available with features walk throughs and developer documentation. Or take Web Monitor for a spin by downloading our fully functional shareware version. Don't let your Web Site keep you up at night!

Web Monitor Operation

The main page is the most important one which displays a list view of the current activity as well as the base information for the currently selected site. All other tabs of the interface are specific to a particular site configuration. Figure 1 shows the main interface that you see when Web Monitor is first loaded.

To configure a site for monitoring you simply add a URL and specify the frequency of monitoring. You can optionally provide a username and password for the URL and a search string to locate in the URL to look for - if the search string is not found the request is considered failed even though it completed.

The contact info page allows you to specify email information that is used to contact you when a server goes down. You can enter an unlimited number of email addresses and provide info on your mail server email send options. Here I have an email address as well as a cell phone email box to get notified of the failure. Mail Server and other configuration options are configured separately.

The Actions info page allows you to configure actions that occur when a request fails. In addition to emailing the contacts in the email list on failure and when the site comes back up, the actions page allows running of any system moniker - URLs or operating system applications or batch files. On the following page I run a URL with login information for the first failure and a batch file for the second:

You can run both quick and slow recurring links through Web Monitor. For example, I like to run a number of Web based maintenance tasks that happen once a day through Web Monitor. Web Monitor can be configured to run requests at long intervals which amount to running a request once a day or once a week.

Activity of Web Monitor can be viewed directly in the user interface or you can use the Log Viewer to view both Error and Detail Logs to get a history of failures and/or all transactions.

The application can run as a standalone Exe application or as a System Tray applet that doesn't show any user interface until you click on the tray icon. To launch the app in TrayIcon mode you can run with the -trayicon commandline switch.

Windows Service Support
In addition to the running in the Taskbar you can also run Web Monitor as a Windows Service using the Service Version. The Service version also provides desktop functionality but adds Windows Service support and provides a full featured ASP.NET front end for the Windows Service that allows full remote configuration and viewing of the logs over the Internet.

Full .NET Source Code Version

Web Monitor is also optionally available with source code to allow extension of the Web Monitoring functionality. The application is built with modular design for site checking and site list checking that can plug into other applications relatively easily.

If you're interested in how Web Monitor works, want to extend its functionality or plug this sort of functionality into your own .NET application, you can purchase Web Monitor with Source Code. The WebMonitorSite and WebMonitorSiteList classes are built in a very modular fashion and can be easily integrated into other .NET applications. The application also includes a number of useful helper classes that simplify many .NET tasks related to retrieving HTTP content.

Purchasing Web Monitor

West Wind Web Monitor distributed as shareware. You can download and try out the software with the fully functional basic version. The shareware version only runs as a desktop application and pops up a nag screen. Web Monitor is not free and if you continue to use the shareware version past its evaluation period of 30 days you must register this copy.

Web Monitor comes in three versions:

• Basic Version (Desktop)  - $99.00
  This version runs as a desktop or tray application. All monitoring and management features are available, but the Windows Service and remote Web administration interface are not available.
   
• Service Version - $199.00
  This version provides the features of the Basic version plus the ability to run as a Windows Service and using the Web remote administration interface to configure Web Monitor and view the logs over the Internet. Note the remote Web Interface requires ASP.NET 2.0 or higher on the machine that Web Monitor runs on.
   
• Source Code Version - $499.00
  This version provides the features of the Service Version but also includes the full C# source code to the application. This includes source to the monitoring components, the desktop front end, the Windows Service and the ASP.NET Web application. We've had so many requests for either the source or customizations that we decided to make the source available in a separate package.

You can register in the West Wind Online Store via secure link with Visa, Mastercard or American Express. For additional payment options please see our pricing pages.  
 

Web Monitor 3.35 released 8/7/2008
We've released Web Monitor 3.35. This release is mainly a bug fix release and it adds better support for running under 64 bit Windows. Previous updates have added exciting new features including Windows Service support, a remote Web Administration interface and improved logging features, support for searching for result content with RegEx expressions, thresholds for notifications and more. Check out the full list of what's new.

Download Web Monitor
Version 3.35 - 8/7/2008 (1.9meg)
Download the shareware version of Web Monitor. The shareware version is fully functional but doesn't include the Service features of the full product.

Watch a Video Walk Through
Watch this 25 minute video that takes you through the features of Web Monitor and shows how to set up sites for monitoring using both the standalone application, the Windows service and the optional Web front end UI to manipulate and monitor your Web Monitor sites.

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Upgrade from previous versions now and Save
If you're an existing user of Web Monitor 2.0  you can purchase an upgrade for the service version. Upgrades to the Basic version are free.