I use PingPlotter Standard 2.60 all day, every day -- an outstanding, indispensible and educational tool.

I need to monitor not only whether my web server is alive, but whether its ColdFusion server is serving pages - a different and more subtle task. The box can be healthy, while ColdFusion is stalled out - a condition which is really the same as a dead box: site visitors can't visit.

Can any PingPlotter version, and/or extensions, monitor for a served ColdFusion page and report/alert that?

Thanks in advance,

-- Bill

Hi, Bill.

PingPlotter really isn't built to monitor a specific service and/or page. You can get there a bit by using our PingPlotter Pro package and an extension we wrote for that for someone. It only monitors the root page, though (for example: http: //www.yoursite.com) and can't monitor any sub-pages. It also doesn't do any checking if the page reply matches what you expect - it only checks to make sure it gets a valid reply from the URL. The extension is written in VBScript, though, so you could probably extend it a bit if you were a bit creative.

If you did this, you'd want to set up two targets and named configurations - one for the full traceroute to the site and the other doing page polling.

If you're interested in this, please email our support department and reference this post and we'll email you the script and some basic instructions.

- Pete