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Quick update on Site Monitor and Google App Engine D-Day

I’ve made a few changes to the way the monitor works in the hope that it will reduce the load on the app and thus the cost based on the new App Engine pricing. There are three implications you should be aware of if you use the monitor.

1) ‘Up’ emails are not sent anymore.
You’ll just have to trust the site is being checked, without the email confirmation.

2) Checking will be 24 times per day, roughly one hour apart
I’ve changed the way the monitoring queue works, so that the sites will be not be dequeued concurrently, and so checked more slowly. However they should all get checked every hour, approximately one hour apart. Failed sites get checked 2 further times to make sure they’re really down, these rechecks will happen almost straight away.

3) If your site is down for 96 consecutive checks (about 4 days) it will no longer be checked.
This is to stop sending endless emails for weeks when a site is taken offline.

Hopefully these changes will keep the monitor running for free from here on out.

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A super simple Magento store monitoring tool powered by Google App Engine

I took a bit of a break for the usual Magento development last weekend and had a crack at making a simple webstore monitoring app using Google App Engine. The application was made to monitor our webstores from a reliable, US network – and who more reliable than Google? So this blog post will detail the site monitoring app, and my thoughts on the Google app engine platform. I’d also invite anyone to try my app and let me know any thoughts you have on it, or how I could improve it.

UPDATE July 2011: I have since created a much more fully features Magento monitoring tool called magespeedtest.com – it checks speed and performance regularly and emails you if it differs from your preset tolerance. I won’t be adding new features to this monitor, it’s still free and I’ll keep it up and running for as long as it makes sense to, but any future development will be on MageSpeedTest.com.

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