Simple WebMonitor 4+

Exactly what I needed for watching sites for downtime

I’ve been desperately seeking a replacement for the old Dashboard Widget called Site Watch that would check any URL you want every time Dashboard is pulled up. I just wanted something simple like that — something that runs in the background and gives me a heads-up when any of my sites can’t be reached. I’m surprised at how few apps there are for this, but of the few I found, this one is by far the best:

- It lives in the menu bar
- It turns red and *pushes a notification* when there’s an outage
- It's completely intuitive, and easy to use and configure…
…While also offering just the right mount of detail for each domain (ping results, status, timestamp)…
…But also links to its own logs in the user Library for more details
- It can be silenced for meetings
- And it can launch at login

None of the similar apps in the Mac App Store have all these features (not even the expensive ones), and many of them are buggy or flat-out don’t work at all. (They do, however, have nicer icons. But not everybody can be a graphic designer!)

I’d originally docked it one star because it didn’t check if the computer was online before running its schedule tests (resulting in erroneous “failed" notifications), but the developer fixed that problem within a couple days of my reporting it.

PS to Mac App Store: This app was rather hard to find. For example, it doesn’t come up when searching for “site monitor.”