uptime monitor service notes
This collection of notes will help you to learn more about the free uptime monitoring and alert services offered by basicstate.com and to help you to get the best results.
how to read alerts and reports
email and sms alerts, daily performance summary
control panel performance graphs
email and sms alerts, daily performance summary
control panel performance graphs
MONITORING SERVICES
The free uptime monitoring service monitors http services. The test attempts to retrieve the home page at a fixed interval of fifteen minutes.
For additional capabilities exactstate.com offers http, https, smtp, imap, pop3, ftp, ssh, telnet and custom tcp ports at intervals between 1 to 20 minutes. Email blacklist monitoring of dnsbl blacklists and rhsdnsbl blacklists is also available for both individual servers and bulk ip address netblocks. Be sure to check out the 2 for 1 bonus offer before deciding on your first purchase.
SMS AND PAGER ALERTS
You can have alerts sent to any email address. Just set up an additional alert recipient using the email address provided by your cell phone or pager service provider. To find out if free email access to your sms phone or pager is available, check with your service provider. You can also check this list of carrier free email to sms address formats If this facility is not available through your carrier, receiving sms alerts will require arranging sms credits with us.
FAILURE ALERT SCHEDULES
Subscribers have full control over the timing of alert transmissions.
Configurable options include:
- email and sms alerts
- alert recipients
- alert trigger delay
- alert repeat frequency
EASY SETUP AND ADMINISTRATION
There is no software to install and it makes no difference if you are running Apache, IIS, Sun or Zeus. All of the software runs on our servers. All a subscriber needs is a web browser to access the control panel and a way of receiving email or sms alerts.
MONITORING METHOD
The uptime monitoring method uses the same process used by your users.
- the site address is resolved using a DNS query to a cacheing DNS server
- a http connection is made
- a http request is sent
- the http result code is examined
- the html page is downloaded
MONITORING FREQUENCY
Individual sites are tested at 15 minute intervals. Public interest e-commerce sites are tested at 5 minute intervals. If a failure is detected, the monitoring frequency is set to every minute until the failure is resolved.
EXTERNAL MONITORING
Internal monitors can give you very fine grained detail of the inner workings of your servers and internal network. The problem is that it can mask network problems outside of the local network. Internal monitors are also usually unable to send alerts if the the monitoring server or internal network fails.
The goal of public facing web sites is to make sure that the site is available at all times to external users. External monitoring is best suited to ensuring that this goal is met because it uses external access routes just like external users and are independent of the facilities being measured.
Furthermore, as an independent data source, it is useful in discussing service difficulties with network and hosting providers.
SELECTING A MAIL SERVER
You must use at least one alert that bypasses any mail server that is dependent on the monitored server and network. If you do not, you will not receive alerts in a timely fashion. This is because if the server or network that is being monitored fails, it is of course, also unable to receive email alerts for you.
It is perfectly acceptable to retain your usual email address as the default destination for reports and backup warnings.
INTEGRATING BACKEND MONITORING
You can monitor backend services by performing the backend tasks in your page source code. On success, return the page with a 200 status code, otherwise return the page with a 500 error code.
LOAD BALANCED SERVERS
To monitor the uptime of load balanced server clusters you will need to take some additional steps. The monitor for the public url of the site should be configured as usual. This will cause alerts to be forwarded if your site becomes completely unavailable. Then, add a monitor for the url of each of the individual servers that make up the load balanced cluster. For example, if your site www.example.com is served by four servers named 1.example.com, 2.example.com, 3.example.com, and 4.example.com, then you will need a monitor for each of the servers 1 through 4 and one for www.example.com
HTTP STATUS CODES
Status codes in the 100,200,and 300 series are interpreted as successful responses. Status codes in the 400 and 500 series are interpreted as failures. The absence or status codes in any other range are interpreted as failures. Further information can be found in RFC 2616
E-COMMERCE MONITORS AND ALERTS
e-commerce services uptime statistics are available publicly on the e-commerce uptime statistics page.
The e-commerce infrastructure services categories include
- e-commerce payment processing gateways
- ppc and ppa advertising publisher networks
- affiliate marketing networks
- virtual server hosting providers
- dedicated server hosting providers
- co-location server hosting providers
- shopping cart hosting providers
RESPONSIBLE USAGE
Our services are intended for the usage of people with a legitimate connection to a site. For example webmasters, site managers, hosting personnel, site owners, etc.
It is not recommended that subscribers create monitoring profiles for external sites not under their control.
If a complaint or request is received from a verified site owner as determined by published whois information, all historical data will be moved to their account and the associated alerts disabled.
The recommended method of obtaining alerts for sites not under your control is to ask that it be added to the list of public monitors. That way, the site data is available to all interested parties without unduly burdening the server with multiple requests.
DOUBLE OPT-IN ACCOUNT VERIFICATION
All subscriptions, including add-in subscribers, are verified by requiring acceptance and verification using a uniquely coded response from verification emails sent by the subscription management system.
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
Per incident diagnostics assistance is available from experienced server and network administration experts. It is also possible to arrange special high intensity monitoring in order to trace intermittent problems. Please see exactstate.com
HELPING BASICSTATE.COM
Users and other interested parties are asked to support us by adding a link to basicstate.com on web sites that they own or manage. Any link or publicity is welcome. An easy way to do this is to grab the ready to use linking code from by clicking here.
You can also click on the tagging sites mentioned below:
UPTIME AT BASICSTATE.COM
basicstate.com has listed its servers for independent third party uptime monitoring at netcraft.com. To see our stats, click here.
DISCOUNT AND PROMOTIONAL COUPONS
When discount and promotional coupons are available they are listed in the private area of the site. The terms of individual offers vary depending on the supplier. To request a coupon of interest to you, just click on the link and it will be delivered to you by email. Each coupon is unique and issued for the use of the member requesting the coupon.
DISCOUNT COUPONS AND CODES
The services of basicstate.com are always free. You never have to search the web for discount codes or coupons to get the best deal. Free is as good as it gets. From time to time discount codes are posted at coupon sites to qualify for listings. But, even if you don't have a discount code, you will still get the same price, free.
FIVE NINES UPTIME CALCULATION
Calculating five nines uptime is not always an easy task for everyone since it involves mixing percentages, decimals and time conversions in the same calculation. A precalculated chart of the actual times that varying levels of percentage uptime imply is located here.
SERVER UPTIME MONITOR AND ALERT SYNONYMS
Some of the names we have seen used for server uptime monitor and alert services are:
- website status monitor
- website uptime monitor
- website downtime monitor
- website availability monitor
- web server status monitor
- web server uptime monitor
- web server availability monitor
- ... and so on
source: basicstate.com
