It’s a fair question to ask why I’d pay for Enterprise-class application and network monitoring software when free and inexpensive alternatives exist. For many people–myself included in most of the start up companies where I managed our technology operations–we just had to make do with what I could find, create, and support. In many cases, I ended up creating simple web pages that executed tests I defined myself, then hooked those up with a web content monitor (e.g. to check the replication status of two mysql database servers.) But as I’ve delved deeper into understanding the Heroix product, I’ve found much of the work has already been done to enable this next level of monitoring without resorting to custom web development.

Heroix calls these kinds of tests, “transactions,” the most basic being the HTTPUrl transaction. This transaction checks the content of a web page to match or fail specific content based on a regular expression you provide. This is the transaction monitor I used above coupled with a web page script.

It seems a basic concept, but I’ve found even this monitor is often not used in practice. At one company our web systems were monitored by an IT department unfamiliar with our new line of business. They used What’s Up Gold to monitor their entire network, but they had only deployed the default configurations that essentially amounted to little more than a ping or http connect monitor. Similarly, a 3rd-party vendor we engaged to monitor our servers produced interesting reports about low latency and “100% uptime,” but when we said, “no, we actually know it’s not 100% because we were down yesterday,” things became complicated and we debated over “server uptime” vs. “application uptime.”

Most monitoring–out of the box–is just server monitoring. And it’s amazing how well servers perform when their applications are broken and they can just sit there idle. Once you have found a real problem, it is easy to “point-source” a solution after the fact to watch one particular thing, but that is a very reactive mode to live in. Similarly, once the IT group figures out how to do the monitor they didn’t know you needed, sure, they can turn that on. But if systems engineers have a complete toolset available, they can be much more proactive about helping you monitor your applications.

Here’s a list of some of the transactions Heroix can monitor out of the box. I’ll follow up more this week about how these types of monitors can be used in real situations: