Monitors status of any website directly in the browser, and renders results in a big-screen / projector friendly manner. To put it another way, it is a poor mans / zero-infrastructure website checking system.
The status page consists of a grid representing monitored endpoints (URL:s) and the color coded representation of their reply:
- green = ok
- red = error
- yellow = recovering from recent error
Each individual "monitor" contains a sparkline style graph showing the most recent check results. This historical view of recent tests makes it possible to spot flapping services.
The monitoring URLs are defined as a struct in monitoringurls.json, which gets parsed after the onLoad event. The idea is that, while this file is fine if static, it could just as well be created on-the-fly by some third party inventory- or network monitoring system.
The below screenshot shows what the tool looks like when you have 20+ monitoring points defined. We keep this page showing on a large screen monitor acting a sort of information radiator in the office.
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Web browser compatibility
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Safari (>4): the monitor must be launched from file:// source, but then works with any site)
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FF3.5*/IE7(?)/WK(Safari/Chrome): requires that monitored URLs supply XHR Access Control / Access-Control-Allow-Origin header in their response
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Pages are requested directly by the web browser, and as a consequence you do indeed end up testing the network between your computer and the web server. And if your browser uses a caching web proxy, you will also end up practically testing its availability too.