Website Checker

Here at DTI we wanted to keep a close eye on a couple of our hostedwebsites. We needed a program that would constantly monitor the websites and send out an email if for any reason those websites weren’t returning the correct html or went offline. To solve this problem we took a couple of days and developed a small in-house program dubbed the DTI Website Checker.

Basically, Website Checker loops through a list of websites and checks them with a given text string to make sure they are up and running, and displaying the correct page. If the given link doesn’t respond or doesn’t find the text it was looking for it checks it again. If there is still a problem it sends out an email to the address given to let someone know that something is wrong.

Since it is just an internal application we figured we’d have a little fun with it. It sits down in the task bar of the computer with an icon that resembles Lion-O from the popular cartoon series Thundercats. As long as all the websites are working correctly Lion-O waits, checking again every 5 minutes.

If for some reason something goes wrong that’s when we get an email and a notification if we’re sitting at the computer at that moment. At that point our friendly Lion-O icon changes into the evil Mumm-ra from the same cartoon. So, if we see Mumm-ra sitting in the task tray we know right away that something isn’t right. The icons were obtained from Iconshock.com