Tag: features

Server Check v1.3

We recently released version 1.3 of Server Check, which introduces two new monitor types, as well as a window layout save feature, and some changes to monitor reports.

Server Check is free software for monitoring servers and websites for downtime, and provides email alerts (via your own SMTP server or via our built-in mail system) and SMS alerts to your mobile phone, as well as on-screen and audible alerts.

We recently released version 1.3, which adds two new monitor types – you can monitor NTP servers (Network Time Protocol) for downtime, and you can also monitor TLS certificates (Transport Layer Security) for downtime (which would usually indicate an expired or incorrectly-installed certificate).

We recognise that some users like to customise the layout of Server Check and now it’s easy to save your layout and recall it using the Work Area Save and Reload features, found in the Window menu. Now if you need to close some panels, change the size of others or move them around, you can bring back your own personalised layout simply using the work area reload feature, putting things back where you like them to be.

We’ve also added the option to choose any response code to the HTTP monitor type, which means you can monitor websites for downtime regardless of what the response code is. Of course, you can still specify the desired response code if that’s what you’re looking to keep an eye on.

Finally, we made some tweaks to the failure statistics reset functions to make these work better, and we improved the reports generation system to allow users to select how far back in time you want the report to cover. This means that if you had some failures six months ago as well as some in the last month, but you only want the boss to receive email reports covering the last month, you can now do this very easily.

We think you’ll love the improvements we’ve made, but if there’s anything else you’d like to see or you have any comments or questions about using Server Check to monitor your websites and servers for that all-important downtime, get in touch with us via our Contact page.

You can download Server Check, the free server monitoring software, by clicking here. Don’t forget to register your copy for a free 10-monitor license, which unlocks all monitor types!

Monitor eBay listings with Server Check

Server Check isn’t limited to monitoring servers or pinging IP addresses – you can even use it to keep an eye on an eBay item and get an alert when the price (or something else!) changes.

Click for full-size image

Simply set up an HTTP monitor, enter the URL of the eBay listing into the Hostname entry box, and set the monitor to check that the result contains the price on the page. Once you click OK, Server Check will start to check the listing page as often as you set the check interval. If the price changes, you’ll get an alert.

You could also set the monitor to check that the result does NOT contain a certain price, so that if the seller changes their listing at some point to the price you want, you’ll get an alert to let you know it has been changed.

We didn’t create Server Check to check eBay, Amazon and other websites for price changes, but it’s something we thought was too useful to keep to ourselves!

If you aren’t using Server Check, you can give the free 10-monitor version a try – and it includes everything you would need to start monitoring eBay your websites and servers, right out of the box!

Check Web Servers for Downtime

Server Check is 3 years young, and we’ve been checking web servers for downtime since 2018.

When we launched Server Check in March 2018, we thought it would be a tidy little utility that would allow simple monitoring of web sites and pinging of web servers, with a pop-up that alerted you to a problem.

Fast-forward to 2021, and Server Check has become a fully-featured application with monitoring for different types of connection, and alerts in several forms – emails, SMS text, audible alarm and on-screen pop-up.

Server Check also now has a web interface for remote monitoring of the system. With full control over the information that is displayed, and built-in uptime pages that your customers can use to check your system uptime stats, the web server is included with all versions of Server Check – even the free 10-monitor version.

We know our users love the “set-and-forget” aspect of Server Check. It’s simple to install, load up your monitor set and then let Server Check do the rest. In an ideal world, you’d never hear from it again – but we all know that servers and websites can go down or offline for all sorts of reasons. Server Check will always be listening and checking on those valuable servers, sites and connections, including HTTP, SMTP, MySQL, etc. If and when you get that email/text or hear the Server Check siren sound, you know that you’ve got a chance to sort out the problem before it becomes… a problem!

We’re busy working on some new features which will allow monitor sets to be synchronised between multiple Server Check installations, as well as allow one installation of Server Check to check that another installation is up and running. Yes, we want Server Check to be able to keep an eye on itself! It’s not that we think it’s unreliable, but we know that peace of mind can be very comforting, and this will add an additional layer of redundancy to the Server Check Monitoring System.

We are also working on adding a “response code” option to the HTTP monitor checks, which means that Server Check can check a website or web server and look for more than just a reponse code of 200.

Thanks for being a Server Check user! We’re proud of how far Server Check has come in only 3 years, and if you haven’t joined our growing user base yet, why not give the FREE 10-monitor version of Server Check a try? You can use it without registration and monitor up to 10 HTTP or ICMP PING connections, and if you register the software (again, for FREE) you can add different types of monitors including SMTP, IMAP, FTP, MySQL, TCP and POP.

Unique URL codes to view specific monitors

The daily stats page generated by the Server Check Monitoring System

Not everyone who uses the Server Check Monitoring System knows that it has a built-in web server that allows for remote viewing of monitor stats and monitor reports, as well as daily and monthly uptime pages which can be used for public uptime pages.

The web server is part of Server Check and doesn’t require additional stacks or software to be installed – there’s no need to have Apache or IIS running, and no need for PHP or MySQL. Everything you need is built right into Server Check. You can even add an SSL/TLS certificate (in PFX format) to the web server configuration so that all web pages can be served securely.

The best thing about all this is that the web server is fully functional even in the FREE versions of Server Check!

The web server configuration settings built into Server Check allow users to select which monitors are displayed, select which types of monitors are displayed, restrict the web pages to show only monitors with particular information or statuses (for example, show only healthy monitors and exclude any that are failing or failed), and so on. The stats pages will show all monitors that have the web feature switched on and that match the selections in the web server configuration.

However, a company might want to make the stats for one (or selected) monitor(s) available to view without showing all the others that are set up in their Server Check installation (for example, if you’re a web hosting reseller or web developer and want to allow customers to view the stats for their own web sites only).

We’ve now added a new feature that makes this exact feature available to all Server Check users. It’s ready to go in the latest version (which you can download here). The new unique URL codes allow individual, specific monitors to be viewed in the stats web pages, easily and quickly.

Let’s see how this works.

Define your unique URL code in the monitor edit panel:

Server Check’s new unique monitor codes for use in URLs

Note: when adding new monitors, a unique code will be automatically generated but you can change this if you wish to.

The monitor can now be viewed by visiting the URL of your Server Check installation, plus the URL of the stats page you want to view, plus the unique code as a “?view=” query string key/value pair in the URL. For example, if your IP address is “1.2.3.4” and your default daily stats page URL is “/daily” then a specific monitor’s unique URL would look something like this:

https://1.2.3.4/daily?view=e006ffc8840cbffb244583255f321a90

Note: the base URL of your Server Check installation may be an IP address, or a domain name if you have set this up in your DNS correctly and opened/forwarded the correct port for the web server configuration.

The query string key “view” can also be abbreviated or omitted, as in these examples:

https://1.2.3.4/daily?v=e006ffc8840cbffb244583255f321a90
https://1.2.3.4/daily?e006ffc8840cbffb244583255f321a90

Multiple monitors can also be viewed at once by including commas between each code, for example:

https://1.2.3.4/daily?view=mysmtpserver,customer2,sqlserver

As you can see, this feature is extremely useful for sharing stats with different customers, departments, or for creating different views and combinations of stats pages.

The unique URL codes allow monitor stats pages to be visited even when your main default pages are password protected (if you have this configured in the Web Server settings panel). This way, you can still see all stats and results securely as an admin, whilst clients can visit their unique URLs without needing any log in details – they just need the URL you provide to them. If you wish to disable this type of access, simply leave the monitor’s unique URL code blank and the URL will no longer work.

Server Check v1.0.20200613

We have just released version 1.0.20200613 of Server Check, and it can be downloaded here.

This release modifies the time Server Check will perform its auto-update check and adds a new layout option to the summary window. Now the summary window can be stacked either horizontally or vertically!

The added layout option means that Server Check is more flexible that ever, with a user interface that can be laid out exactly how you want it… making sure the information you need is right where you want it!

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