title: How to monitor external web services?
body: <p>We are developping a web application that uses external web services as the main data source. The web services have been created and are maintained by one of our close partners. Even though they are supposed to work all the time, they are not 100% reliable. From time to time, they stop being reachable or they start throwing exceptions.</p>
  
  <p>What would be a good way of monitoring external web services and getting informed when something wrong happens? </p>
  
  <p>Limitation:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Web services are host externally on our partner's servers</li>
  <li>We don't have the source code of these web services</li>
  <li>We have no control over the general infrastructure</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I thought of creating a simple .NET application that calls the web services regularly and report when there is a problem (by email, in a log file or in a db). But maybe you have better ideas?</p>