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What problems do I have to think before creating a monitoring system like pingdom, etc?

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  • Saturating your logfiles with monitoring requests
  • Consuming too many server resources (if it leaves a Keep-Alive connection dangling, until the time out, is the timeout lower then your retry?)
  • Forcing the kernel to keep whatever you're requesting every minute in disk cache memory
  • Are you going to exhaust the server/clients tcp connections

In general you're forcing it to keep whatever you're transferring in memory, and you can potentially exhaust resources if you're not paying attention to how it's working, or if a dynamic page you're requesting leaks resources, etc..

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Keep in mind, many of these downsides can be avoided. I.e., filtering out the pingdom user agent from the access logs, using a specific page for testing (i.e., status pages), and so on. – Andrew M. Jan 19 '11 at 23:20
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I think Essobi covers it well. Note that pinging or making an http request once a minute is a pretty low-impact thing to do, given current network bandwidth and cpu power. – Phil Hollenback Jan 19 '11 at 23:36
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