Jenkins for monitoring application in prod

While I'm interested in Jenkins as a means to provide continuous build functionality, I'm really even more interested in Jenkins as a means to exercise my application in its prod environment against unexpected changes in infrastructure beyond my control that may effect my application. I can't find a ton of information on using Jenkins in this way, but I was wondering if there are others out there doing this? Essentially I have a project that runs maven test开发者_如何学运维 parametized with my prod url, but for these projects I don't actually do any building. Are there other tools besides Jenkins I should be considering to do this? If so, why?

If you've got your tests set up to run via Maven already, I think Jenkins would be a good option. You could set up email, IM or SMS alerts using Jenkins plugins, and keep a record of the results within Jenkins.

The only down sides I can think of are:

1. You'll probably want to run your monitoring a lot more frequently than a regular CI job, so you might want to keep more build records than the default of 10.
2. If you already have a system like Nagios or OpenView to monitor system resources, it might be better to integrate app monitoring into that rather than having another source of truth.

Jenkins Provides a plugin called Status Monitor Plugin

We have ours set to check a specific URL every 5 mins and email us when something fails. Our problem is that it won't sent emails to cell phone carrier email addresses. However, if regular email will suffice, the setup time for a plugin is less than a half hour and it is reliable as long as the Jenkins server stays up.