Host Monitoring ?

With the blessings of MS-Access and poor ASP coding from the previous webmaster we've been having some terrific web service issues everytime we run a scheduled back-up. The server is IIS.

Ofcourse we are working on building a completely new system in place with Apache, PHP, MySQL and a little Java but untill that's in order we are looking to tame the current beast.

I've been looking around for some good "Host Monitoring" solutions which could probably re-start the webservice when its down or atleast send the webmaster an email (notification to the pager would be great ). I finally came upon this one: KS-Soft

Just wanted to get opinions and experiences (if any) from y'all about them and any other products that y'all might have been using.

Ive always home grown things like that whenn I do them on a small scale. I used to just write my reachability code and set it up as a daemon in Perl to run every 5 minutes or so.

i believe alertra.com is the best, you pay for what you get but you could always do what nawlej said. I too have written a script (php) to monitor my server every 5 minutes on essential services then it will email me when something goes down (Still working on SMS to me though )