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Heartbeat Monitoring
At UWE, we have use a single PC sat in the corner of the office with a wall-mounted monitor which we use to monitor our systems' heartbeat - this runs a scheduled task every 10 minutes which calls a wsh script written in vbs. The script makes HTTP GET or POST (in cases where basic auth credentials are required) requests to several urls, waits for a response responses within 30 seconds, and checks for a specific string in the each response.
These responses are collated and recorded as OK (timely response containing expected string), UX (unexpected: timely response but without expected string) or DN (down: no response within 30 seconds).
This is saved as XML and pushed out to a webserver where it is served as our 'green screen' using XSLT: UWE Status Page : http://info.uwe.ac.uk/status - individual boxes represent each service - green for OK, yellow for UX and red for DN. Any service which is defined as a production service in the monitoring script will also turn the background yellow, or red, thereby giving higher visibility to the issue.
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