I reviewed HealthMonitor 3.1, sometime ago, and was quite pleased with the free version of this monitoring tool. However, some things didn’t work properly, for example, the HTTP plug-in. I now tested the new version, HealthMonitor 4.0.

Its new Outlook-like interface is a great improvement. There are some new plug-ins allowing you to monitor various services. The free version of HealthMonitor 4.0 can check the availability of a service by the following means: Ping, http, disk space, CPU load, memory page faults, network traffic, events, Windows services, completion of scheduled tasks, and NTbackups. There is a lite and a pro version, which are able to monitor more services. Please, check this comparison table for more information.

The notification options are more or less the same as in version 3. HealthMonitor can notify you by email, net send, and SMS. It can launch external scripts whenever one of the thresholds you configured is exceeded.

All in all, HealthMonitor 4.0 made a more reliable impression than its predecessor. However, the http-plugin is still not working, properly. Meanwhile, the sending of notifications works. If the tool realizes that the Web server isn’t available anymore, it now logs the status change and also sends emails. The only problem is, it isn’t able to recognize consistently if a Web server is online or not. During my test, HealthMonitor often failed to connect to my test Web server even though I was able to access it from the very same machine with a browser. I didn’t have this problem with the ping plug-in, though.

Also note that you still have to close the user interface to save the configuration. I wonder, why is there no save button?