title: Using wget to do monitoring probes
body: <p>Before I bang my head against all the issues myself I thought I'd run it by you guys and see if you could point me somewhere or pass along some tips.</p>
  
  <p>I'm writing a really basic monitoring script to make sure some of my web applications are alive and answering. I'll fire it off out of cron and send alert emails if there's a problem.</p>
  
  <p>So what I'm looking for are suggestions on what to watch out for. Grepping the output of wget will probably get me by, but I was wondering if there was a more programmatic way to get robust status information out of wget and my resulting web page. </p>
  
  <p>This is a general kind of question, I'm just looking for tips from anybody who happens to have done this kind of thing before.</p>