The gatekeeper of reality is quantified imagination.
Project "siteBotAuditor"
Purpose
The purpose of this project is to demonstrate how you can diagnose the availability of one or more of your websites under http and https. The website auditing tool, siteBotAuditor, can send email alerts when it has detected that a website has failed an audit and, if you need it, can run continously.
The auditing bot also can tell you if it detects an issue with SSL certificates. As well, the diagnostic can tell you what the expiration date of an SSL certificate is. Finally, the siteBotAuditor will send email alerts when it determines that an SSL certificate is going to expire by the next month as well as the last seven days. No need to get caught off-guard with an expired SSL certificate and lose website visitors!
Websites & Clusters
When you have a website that's replicated across several web servers it can be quite challenging to determine which web server a website may be having issues on. The siteBotAuditor, when a website fails an audit under https, can tell you what web server (by name) the website has failed under. As well, it can tell you what web server (by name) a website has passed audit under when connecting by http.
Have visitors of your website indicated they are having trouble getting to a website, but you can get to the website just fine? There could be several reasons for this behavior, but you could place the siteBotAuditor on a website outside of your network so it is accessing your website in the same manner as your visitors.
[TIP] Websites & Database Servers
If you are concerned about making sure your website(s) that are on a server can contact database servers (on a different server), you could create a webpage on a website that does simple database calls to all the database servers that should be contactable by the server with the website. If their are any failures in contacting a database server, format the response html code as shown below. I can't really give any tips on the code to use since there are a lot of programming languages that have different ways of interacting with databases.
<html><head><title>Failure</title></head><body>Database server names (or some other notation that you'll recognize) that could not be contacted</body></html>
NOTE: The bot recognizes "Failure" in the title to trigger an alert. It then puts whatever you have in the body, into the alert details. What is good to recognize here is that (1) if a 200 code is returned to the bot you know the website is reachable and responds, (2) if no "Failure" is in the title then you know the website can contact the relevant database servers.
siteBotAuditor Requirements
The diagnostic auditing tool is web-based and runs off of a website you have. The siteBotAuditor requires PHP 5.3.2 or later.
Download siteBotAuditor
Click on the link provided below to download the siteBotAuditor. Once downloaded, unzip and open "README.txt" in the main folder for guidelines on how to configure the application to monitor your website(s) and placing it on your website you want to run audits from.
Helpful Tip
If you spend a lot of time going through Windows Server logs with respect to windows codes, you may want to check out the Windows Server Event/Error Log Troubleshooter.
