Pingdom offer a commercial web site monitoring service, they also offer a free monitoring solution that you can join, GIGRIB.

Pingdom GIGRIB is a unique, distributed website monitoring service. GIGRIB users can add websites they want monitored, and in return their computers become a part of the GIGRIB monitoring network.

A while back I setup the GIGRIB client on the only Windows PC in the house and it seemed to run ok. I was contributing several thousands of checks a day to the project and monitoring a couple of sites I was interested in.

The reporting is pretty basic and alerting fairly non-existent so I stopped using the service, however I forgot that the GIGRIB client is setup as a service on the Windows computer and just keeps chugging away.

I was poking around our network recently and saw this traffic on the router ethernet port that the Windows PC is connected to. Bearing in mind we weren’t home the whole day so the PC was just sitting there….

Investigation tracked the usage back to the GIGRIB service that was running on the PC, it was using around 500MB per day, yeah a cool 15GB per month. I stopped the Windows GIGRIB service and you can see the traffic stop at the right hand end of the graph.

It’s a pity the client is so basic and you can’t seem to customise how much time you want to give back to the project, at 15GB a month I’m not that keen to leave it going 24×7.