free and premium monitoring services

free services

the following services are offered for free:

• unlimited testing of http services at the home page
• 15 minute test intervals
• daily reports
• failure alerts via email on a 30 minute delay

the following features require the purchase of credits:

• failure alerts on the schedule of your choice
• choice of email and sms alerts

It is possible to keep costs at a minimum while having both email and sms alerts activated. The key is understanding the alert and testing mechanisms.

Upon an initial failure, the testing system will schedule a repeat of the test in the next minute. If the error is transient, the repeat of the test will clear the error status.

The most cost effective way of setting up your alerts is to set the initial alert to go to only a primary channel. The secondary channel, usually an email address, is set as a backup with a greater initial delay. The secondary channel acts as a backup to the primary channel.

The recommended setting is a 5 minute delay on the primary channel, and a 30 minute delay on the secondary channel.

With this configuration, if a transient server error is cleared on retest, the pending alert is cleared. Since the alert has not been sent, there is no charge.

If the outage goes beyond 15 minutes, then you would most likely prefer that both alert channels activate rather than change missing notification of a prolonged outage.

Even if no alerts are sent because they were cancelled by a retest, the outage will be noted in your daily reports.

Please be aware that once a failure alert has been sent, there will also be a pass alert when the test is again successful. The pass alert is designed to reassure users that may not be able to immediately respond to an initial failure. For example, the user mgiht be driving at the time the alert is sent. This feature cannot be disabled, so you must be aware that it exists. However, it will not be sent if the initial failure alert has not been sent due to cancellation.

what happens when credits run out

The current usage credit balance is shown on all alerts and reports.

If an account is completely depleted of credits, testing will continue, and enabled email alerts will be sent with a 30 minute delay. However, SMS alerts will not be sent.

Once an account is replenished with additional credits, operation will automatically return to normal without further action.