Through the use of a free client download from Ipwalk, users can enable realtime monitoring of their website’s uptime and any other user can check that status online.
Green Is Good, Red Is Bad. Ipwalk recently announced the debut of their distributed website monitoring system, GIGRIB.
A downloadable client for the beta version of GIGRIB is available for Windows platforms 2000, XP, and 2003. Once installed, the client communicates with other clients, which regularly test connectivity while using a small amount of bandwidth.
Ipwalk collects the uptime information on its website where anyone can check to see if a website in the system has been up or down. Since the tests come from multiple locations, a webmaster can see if a site has been available to all or some of those testers.
On the Uptime site, Ipwalk displays information for a site including the date, time up or down, and time monitored for that period. A downtime log shows the periods of time a site was down before returning to an up status.
Peter Alguacil of Ipwalk explained more of the concept in a statement from the company:
The goal of GIGRIB is to provide uptime statistics for all the web hosting companies and Internet service providers in the world on a server and network level. This way, future discussions about company uptimes can be based on public facts instead of pure speculation.
Like any distributed application, the more users that download GIGRIB, the better and more powerful it will become, collecting more and more uptime data.
Alguacil likened GIGRIB to technologies like the former SETI@home project or the BitTorrent technology for sharing large files; both functioned as distributed systems, one for computation, the other for file sharing.
Ipwalk’s issue will be to find critical mass for its application. Until then, commercial services like those provided by Keynote have little reason to worry about GIGRIB becoming a threat.
Ipwalk should consider a Unix/Linux version of their client, as many webmasters prefer running on a non-Windows platform. That could help it find more acceptance among Linux or Unix users who may be interested in GIGRIB.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
