Monitoring website with Google Docs

Website owner’s urge to track the progress of their website, for instance they like to get alerts in their mail box as their website become inaccessible to public or goes down.

There are countless ways to keep an eye over your website progress, you can either subscribe to the websites offering monitoring services to track your website downtime and uptime or one can build his/her own website monitor with Google Docs. The biggest advantage with Google Docs is that one can configure it to track their website status every second and the owner know at once if his site is down. The interesting thing is it is entirely free of cost.

How to monitor website with Google Docs:

Monitoring with Google Docs is not a difficult task, it just takes few minutes to configure. Following are a few easy steps

  • Sign in to your Google account and click on the link to copy the Google Docs sheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aofk8L6brI_edDBrWTh1T05zWkxyS1hUMFZWSXJYMEE&newcopy=true&pli=1
  • Now add the URL of your website in cell E3 and the email address in cell E5. This will be the email where you want to get notifications for uptime and downtime.
  • Now go to Tools click on “script Editor” then click “resources” and current script’s triggers and set the “time driven trigger” for 5 minutes or every 5 minutes.
  • Now save the trigger and the Google Docs will display a huge red warning inquiring for authorization. Accept and save the trigger again.

That’s all. After that Google Docs sheet now monitors your website every time and send an alert on your mailbox whenever there is some trouble in accessing your website. As the issue gets resolved you will receive another email alert displaying “all is well”. Similarly, downtime details are also shown in the sheet and you can analyze it easily in detail. Additionally, if you have knowledge and understanding about programming then, create a Twitter app only to track your website’s uptime and the Google Docs will send alert through SMS or Tweets, if your site has any problem.