Today I noticed that one of my websites was down and it was down 3 days and I just found it out today. Because of this I consider using Pingdom.com to monitor my websites. I wonder how does Pingdom work? - How do they check if my website loads or not? Do they just load my website? If yes, how often do they do it? And won't this consume too much of my bandwidth?
Being a website & server monitoring company we use a software called Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), we install the SNMP software on the client's server which in turns help us to sending all the information about the website and server like If your website is down, CPU Usage memory consumptions etc. For more information on installation please visit the following URL: SNMP Installation on Windows http://support.monitorscout.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=38 SNMP Installation on Linux http://support.monitorscout.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=37
I don't think Pingdom uses SNMP, as stated by previous poster. Pingdom likely just attempts to load the page using standard HTTP protocol, at the set interval you would likely choose in their control panel. Bandwidth consumption depends on the size of your site, your set interval, and what the Pingdom spider actually collects for data (not sure if it collects images or not, not likely) so I'm assuming the bandwidth usage isn't much of a concern. If one of the servers at Pingdom cannot reach your site, I'm assuming it attempts to browse your site using other servers in different geographical locations to determine if the server is truly offline or not.
I know that a lot of my clients use pingdom to monitor the site. I personally prefer http://www.monitor.us, the best tool in mu opinion for monitoring the site. The monitoring process looks like this from their side: Register on the site, Choose Monitor, then Add monitor: Don't change anything in the first window, click Next. Enter the domain in the URL/IP field and click Next: Don't change anything in the next window (our monitoring is free), and click Add. Don't change the notification settings, click Done: Repeat the steps for every domain.