What is the right way to send a watch dog request to an ASP.NET web server?

I have an ASP.NET web server and I wish to have a watchdog sending it periodic requests. Currently, I am planning to add an EmptyPage.aspx and then request it periodically from a locally running watchdog application.

Is there a better way to implement the 开发者_如何转开发watchdog facility?

P.S.

The server may be deployed in an intranet without the access to Internet, hence please do not suggest using 3rd party watchdog sites.

What exactly is the purpose of WatchDog here? Do you want to make sure that your site is always running (in case of application-pool/machine restarts) or you want to do some health check? Your approach is more than sufficient for the former whilst for later, you may want to do more than Empty Page. Few things that can be considered for health checking are:

• Return information about system resources such as memory utilization, average CPU utilization etc so that watchdog may raise alarm on some threasholds
• Make a database query to ensure that the database is running or not