thoughts on using uptimerobot.com to monitor site?

Jaymer

One of my customers wanted to use https://uptimerobot.com/ to monitor his site.
Just hitting the login.html or logonOp.aw doesn't prove Aware is up.
Just this week in the middle of business something happened to Tomcat and Aware wouldn't respond after trying to login - system was down 40 mins.
Needed a Tomcat restart (I start Aware with Control Panel, & Tomcat separately from DOS window - so I did not restart Aware, only Tomcat) and all was fine.

So I thought about making an Aware user named "Uptime" and making an encyrpted login. I could set the Session to 60 seconds. And maybe have Uptime check every 5 minutes. If it logs in fine then Aware must be available.

Any thoughts?

RLJB

Been doing this for 5+ years, it's awesome. We do this:

Small BSV on the prod server has a guest access enabled, it shows a VP with a keyword in it. Uptimerobot logs in every minute and looks for the keyword, if not found it phones two people in our business and sends SMS.

We have quite a lot of users, so we find users usually start complaining (sending tickets) about the same time as Uptimerobot, but if you're asleep (we're in Aus and we prod servers in US) and a server goes down this is invaluable (nothing better than waking up to uptime robot when a prod server has fallen over).

kklosson

I created a robot with WinAutomation. Since buying it years ago, it has become much more expensive. I have one robot to login to a special VP, make sure it can read the words there, and logout. If it fails, it triggers a .bat file to restart everything and send me a little email. The second bot cleans out the images from the application folder once per day. RPA is big and everyone is getting in the business. The tools range from ghastly expensive to reasonable. I used to have terrible instabilities but over time, solved everything by optimizing my application. Still, having a self-healing capability is comforting. I found that when things went south, all things AwareIM crapped out, so I wouldn't rely on another AwareIM app for the monitoring. I also employ Zohp Site 24/4 as a redundant monitor, though it has no ability to restart the app services.

Side note: I use the .bat file as a trigger in Windows scheduling to deploy a BSV during off-hours. My AWS snapshot completes around 6:10am and I schedule a start at 6:30 with a BSV in the Auto_Depoyment folder. This works very well for me.

RLJB

I use the .bat file as a trigger in Windows scheduling to deploy a BSV during off-hours. My AWS snapshot completes around 6:10am and I schedule a start at 6:30 with a BSV in the Auto_Depoyment folder. This works very well for me.

Now this is interesting, can you explain more pls? What do you mean by "deploy a BSV during off-hours" is this publishing?