What’s Monitos About?
The Monitos Toolbox and Monitos Watcher were born from the need to consolidate the vast array of tools available out on the internet for simple systems and network administration tests. There is frequently a need for these tests when your job at a company is to enable services for the public and you need a simple way to verify a port is open, a DNS record is correct or even a website returns the content you would expect. Generally, people who have this need will bring up a search engine, search for the test they are looking for, muck through dozens of advertisements and popups, then finally find the test they are looking for. Monitos strives to simplify this task by bringing all the tests into one lightweight and clean web platform that will improve the use of your time by avoiding unnecessary roadblocks.
Monitos Watcher
This application allows you to have a space to perform some scheduled testing of various services and receive email notifications in the event there is a problem. This is helpful if you are responsible for ensuring a website is available to the public, a service is listening on a specific port, or you want to make sure a host is alive.
Monitos Toolbox
The Monitos toolbox is a free to the public service that aids in quickly testing service availability as well as some other diagnostic tasks.
- Port: This feature allows you to test whether a port is listening on a specific host or IP address.
- HTTP: This allows for checking a variety of response information from a HTTP(S) service, this can assist by describing any redirect information, Header information, Status codes as well as body searches.
- Certificate Information: This test returns information about the certificates bound to IP addresses for a service. The certificate dates, subject information, alternate names and issuer are all presented back for analysis.
- DNS: Allows you to look up a variety of DNS records and view their relevant information. This tool can be used to verify that a hostname is properly resolving to a specific IP address or if a MX record is properly configured for your domain.
- WHOIS: Allows for the review of domain name registration information as well as contact information. It’s a quick and easy way to see who owns a domain, what their nameservers are and who to contact with questions.
- PING: This tool is a quick way to see if a host is up and responding to ICMP requests as well as get some latency information (how long it takes for the host to respond). There are 4 tests performed in order to allow you to watch for any spikes in response time.
- SSL Ciphers: This tool enables you to scan your SSL enabled host for a variety of SSL protocol information. It is recommended that anything below TLSv1.2 be disabled, and using this tool its easy to see what your host is actually accepting for connection protocols. The tool lists out what protocols answered the request and what ciphers were offered for the connection.
- GeoLocate IP: Allows for the geolocation of an IP address. When looking through your web server logs and you see one IP hammering away at your server, you wonder what country that IP address is coming from, this tool will tell you. It will even draw it out on a map.
We continue to add more tools as we develop them. Please check back on occasion to see what new.
Why We’re Here
We would consider this application to be a success if it becomes a one stop shop for people who work in the IT field and run into the same problems throughout their day. This site is somewhat young, but as I continue to make progress on the tools I’m determined to develop, please check back frequently, you never know what will be rolled out next.
Try it out. Its Free!