I know Zabbix and Nagios, but I don't know any company that host those services for others to use.
I would like to find a solution that monitored at least some of my public URLs (if they are returning a expected result).
I know Zabbix and Nagios, but I don't know any company that host those services for others to use.
I would like to find a solution that monitored at least some of my public URLs (if they are returning a expected result).
There's Pingdom for uptime and response time measurement. It can use Ping, HTTP, POP, IMAP, SMTP to check the uptime and response time of your servers.
Mails and SMSes can be sent when the server is unreachable or doesn't supply the desired result, however I don't believe you can specify which content you should receive if you use HTTP checks. Just the various HTTP response codes are checked, such as 200 OK, or a 404 or 500 error. There are nice graphs and reports and an iPhone app for on-the-go monitoring.
It will run its checks from a pool of servers worldwide and will verify a failure via another server to make sure it doesn't annoy you with issues of their own datacenters.
I've recently started their trial and am quite impressed with the ease of use and response speed. The downside is it only checks things which can be checked from the outside, i.e. no CPU monitoring or Diskspace alerting.
My company provides a product, Server Density, which is exactly this. Zabbix / Nagios are more suited to custom monitoring, but we do monitor key OS stats like CPU, memory, disk usage and applications like MySQL, Apache and Nginx. There's also a plugin system and API.
We support Windows, Linux, Mac and FreeBSD servers.
There aren't any companies providing hosted versions of Nagios or Zabbix as they're not really designed for a multi-tenant hosted model. They work great if you're setting up a single deployment, but don't work well when you're trying to setup separate deployments for individual cusotmers. There are a number of monitoring providers that offer a similar service (full disclosure, my company Panopta is one of them) but these tend to all but custom developed to fit the needs of the hosted model.
There are quite a few options out there, depending on what your needs are. At the simplest end there are services that will monitor a handful of webpages that are free or only a few dollars per month, to higher-end offerings that can handle hundreds of servers and numerous services per server. There are a number of other threads here that provide recommendations, or you can do a Google search for "server monitoring" and find quite a few. Most will give you a free trial period during which you can test out the service, so you can try a number of them and see what's the best fit for your needs.
The website Monitor Tools has a directory of monitoring tools that are hosted, or delivered via Software as a service model.
You may want to check out alert logic and counterpane. Those are the some I know of. However, as you mentioned there are lots of free and commercial monitoring tools do this job.
This really depends on what OS your running and also what services you wish to monitor, I've recently started to use HoundDog (owned by GFI) http://www.hounddogiseasy.com/, its very good for windows based OS.
Alternatively Pingdom is great for checking uptime of webservers etc
We use WebSitePulse, in addition to our usual Nagios setup, specifically to test public access to our networks from multiple locations around the globe. It is a little pricey unfortunately, but their service is good.
Pingdom offer a similar 'multi-source' service, and have a better UI, but last time I checked didn't have as many geographic monitoring sources. They are much cheaper too.
Many customers also use Site Confidence quite happily too. It has good SLA reporting, as far as I understand.