I will start with pointing out that this article is not about tracking user traffic, but about availability monitoring, i.e. detecting and reporting website outages. Availability monitoring In this service a website is automatically monitored by an external pinger. The mechanism acts like a browser, visits the website every 60 seconds and checks if it functions properly. It records the server’s response (investigates if there were any errors), checks if a timeout occurred. Optionally it can also confirm the presence of a defined phrase. In the event of encountering a failure, the system sends notifications via email and SMS, sometimes also on an instant messenger. All events are stored in a database, so one can review the history of availability as well as check the availability within a...