Web site Alert notifications

It's no use have a web site monitoring package if you can't get it to tell you what's gone wrong in a convenient manner.

Site Vigil offers a lot of reporting flexibility, you can set up numerous different alert schemes all with different options. One of the main important distinctions to make is between alerts that occur as an event (for example a user makes a request for a web site page that does not exist) and continuous conditions (for example when a web site server goes offline). In the first case you need to be informed of each event when it occurs, in the second case you want to know when it first goes offline and then when it comes back online rather than each time it detects that the site is still down.

There is a wide choice of actions to take too, the product can send an e-mail, send an SMS message, generate a system event, access a web page or even run an arbitrary program. This lets you choose the appropriate action dependent on the urgency of the alert condition. You can choose to take a different action when the problem is first raised and when the condition is eventually cleared.

Yet more flexibility is added by the provision of 'escalation', if an alert is not acknowledged by a user within a programmable length of time it will automatically escalate it, taking a more urgent alert action. This means that if you are not at your desk when a server goes offline you can get it to send you an email five minutes after the alert went unacknowledged. If you don't respond to that in ten minutes then you can get it to escalate the alert still further perhaps to a text message to a mobile phone.