forum.e-valid.com

Hey, I just want to monitor if a web application is alive, but eValid isn't free.

What do I do?

FrankS wrote:Hey, I just want to monitor if a web application is alive, but eValid isn't free.

What do I do?

Hey FrankS. Thanks for asking.

There is "monitoring" and then there is "Monitoring".

What's meant is, that you could monitor all kinds of things.

If you just want to know if a web server is alive, you can use "ping" -- which is certainly free and widely available -- to determine if a server is responding.

The next step up would be to do a series of HTML GET commands to download a page (but not all of its components). You can do this in PERL and a wide range of other environments -- all for free, too.

These examples are "monitoring." For "Monitoring", with a capital M, you may need something more.

A typical strong monitoring requirement is to determine that the server stack that implements an e-commerce site is accepting user inputs, putting items in a shopping cart, and processing a credit card transaction.

That is a sequence that eValid can do as a playback script. And it is going to be very difficult to do that with "free" offerings. (If you actually DID do that you'd be building a slice of a browser!)

So, as in almost everything, you have to decide what you want to do...and THEN make the choice on the kind of instrumentation you need to get the result you want.

Obviously, we recommend eValid for "Monitoring" -- with a capital "M".

-- eValid Support