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.