We need a performance monitoring solution that will tell us if something is amiss with the site.
The answer that provides the most comprehensive discussion of various solutions and which one is recommended (and why) will win the reward.
People succeed in answering Rich Collins's questions 37% of the time (32 successes in 86 attempts).
Answers by: DarcyB | Dave | Adam Thorsen | JSO1
I'd recomend nagios (http://www.nagios.org) running on a seprate host that has reliable internet connectivity. Nagios comes with a swath of configurable plugins, or you can create your own. These plugins can be configured to do simple ping tests all the way up to full http post requests. The tests can monitor respocne times, and validate content. Failures can trigger email or SMS messages to be sent. You can create diffrent notification methods based on times, as well as setup maintaince windows to ensure notices are not sent during known outage periods.