Regular BitTorrent users should know that a public torrent tracker can get a fit of hiccups any time of the day. With recent incidents involving anti-piracy organizations shutting down public and private trackers, it has become increasingly difficult to find open and public BitTorrent trackers that still race through the wild. You never know when a perfectly fine tracker goes down and takes with it, your torrents, unless it’s got life support in the form of DHT.

Even though a torrent can function without using a tracker, taking help from DHT, tracker-less technologies are still bleeding-edge and aren’t mature. So, it is always recommended that a torrent lists one or several functioning trackers.

Trackon is a service to monitor the status and health of existing open and public trackers that anyone can use. Using the list from the website, you can choose the trackers you wish to list in your torrents, going through their status and health. You can arrange the list on the basis of uptime percentage, status and latency. In case you are looking for a safe SSL encrypted tracker, Trackon makes it even easier by listing the trackers that support it.

Trackon (pronounced as dragon, with a T) is based off the Google AppEngine and currently monitors 63 torrent trackers. It also employs an API, documentation for which can be accessed here. Trackon itself is opensource, and its code can be downloaded from here.