A while back I was supporting the North American VMware sales field around BCDR. It was a wonderful job. I talked about backup / recovery, HA, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), and even processes to help DR. I was a specialist so that means if the meeting was going to be about SRM - which was my main thing, we could actually talk about tape backup processes instead if that is what the customer wanted to do. Often we ended up doing demos. SRM was normally the point of the demo but sometimes other things too. I liked to use my own lab as it was the most realistic and flexible. I think I did this for maybe two years. Once, my lab was not working. I was furious. It turns out I did not need it which was good. I could not afford to be surprised. So I looked for a tool that could track my up-time - from outside of my network. I wanted to be alerted about outages, but also wanted some stats like total up-time / downtime. I found Pingdom. It looked cool, and since I had to only watch one site (the external interface of my View server) I was able to use it for free. Nice.
While it is maybe two or three years later, I am still very happy indeed with this tool. I recommend it.
I mostly use it via my iPhone (yes, there is other kinds of phone support available).
When you log in on your phone this is what you see. I have had some outages lately. Seems like ISP related (I was not at home to break things).
And if you are curious about one of those two outages you can select it and see the following.
Two other useful screens are seen below.
I do like this tool, and I think it is very worth using. Especially since for monitoring your home lab it is free.
Michael
