Which monitoring services have you used?

Probably too many to recall them all. Host-tracker, uppanel, siteuptime, basicstate, mralert, unialert, pingdom. Only their free versions though.

Pingdom so far wins in terms of reliability. Using so many of services means that I do find out about downtime though, even if one of them is not working properly.

Host-tracker

Seems to be the most used by others and popular one.

Originally Posted by ldcdc

Probably too many to recall them all. Host-tracker, uppanel, siteuptime, basicstate, mralert, unialert, pingdom. Only their free versions though.

Pingdom so far wins in terms of reliability. Using so many of services means that I do find out about downtime though, even if one of them is not working properly.

Dan, do you mean you use all of the simultaneously?
If so, how greatly their data were different?

I use Host-Tracker quite a lot to monitor uptime - I would recommend it as you get daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reports on site uptime.

Dan

If so, how greatly their data were different?

It's hard to compare them really, as the check period is different, and their accuracy is, sadly, per my experience, variable as well. Pingdom (paid service) has been consistently accurate though, that I can say.

They are good when you are not the host.

If you are the host they are pretty much useless. Best option (which i use) is a blend of Nagios and Cacti. This way you monitor all your stuff at what interval you want and also monitor the graphs. Using Nagios from at least 2 different locations is advisable.

Nagios will be a good option to monitor the services/servers. As Carbon mentioned above, it will give you an option to configure it accordingly to your needs. May be, if you need you can monitor load too.
A backup plan is also highly appreciated and I have used alertra for that. It will also give you uptime reports for the servers.

Cabron, what makes them useless for a host?