Is this thing on?
It’s not just stand-up comedians wondering that anymore! In the brave new world of “serverizing” (nee Geoweb (nee SDI)) being promoted by ESRI’s Jack Dangermond (and us, and many others) the health of your server could directly impact the health of real live people.
When you stand up a public server with useful services, people will start using that server, and eventually will expect it to be there when they need it. And the better you are at keeping your server up, the stronger that assumption of reliability will become! At the highest levels of expected reliability, outages become newsworthy events in and of themselves.
So, to run a good service, choose good, reliable software — and then don’t trust it! The FGDC has recognized that monitoring is a key to providing reliable SDI services, and has stood up a public system for checking the health of spatial services, the Service Status Checker. As an added bonus, it’s not just for feds, anyone can use it, so give it a try!