craighyde

This awesome for testing. Easier than fumbling around with cURL in my terminal.

Agreed downtime occurs in every system. Also, the most important function of a datacenter is to keep your application/service up and working properly. Use a third party service to be the first to know when it's down. (disclaimer: I am a founder of Rigor.com, and we provide this type of service.)

You should check out Rigor for performance and uptime monitoring of your web servers. It's a subscription service that goes a step beyond the basic cpu/process details and lets you monitor the accessibility of individual pages and transactions. They have a free trial that takes two minutes to set up at http://rigor.com.