Contact Groups added to NodePing

2012/02/10 by Leave a Comment

We have been getting a lot of great feedback and suggestions from our users over the months since we launched the NodePing monitoring service. One feature that many people have asked for is the ability to group contacts and assign notifications to groups of contacts rather than just to individuals. Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve added Contact Groups to the service.

You can now create a Group, assign individual addresses or phone numbers to each contact group, and then set the Group to receive notifications for individual checks. So, for example, you could create a Developers group and a Systems group and have each assigned to different sites or servers you are monitoring. Then if the makeup of that part of your team changes you can change who belongs to the group without having to change each of the notifications.

One way we use this feature in the NodePing team is to assign SMS numbers to a group called SMS. Then we can easily set notifications to all of our phones together. For us, SMS notifications generally mean “Do something about this now!” and it makes it easy to assign key services to this notifications contact group. You could also use it to group all of a person’s contact methods easily for notifications that should get to them wherever they are. So for example you could create a “Shawn” group and include all of Shawn’s email addresses and phone numbers in that group. Then notifications will automatically be sent to all of his addresses.

As with contacts, there is no limit on the number of contact groups you can use in NodePing. You can mix and match contact methods in all kinds of ways, to suit your particular needs. We’re happy to now get to use this feature ourselves, and we hope it will further enhance the usefulness of our service to you as well.

There are a few smaller enhancements and adjustments in the release today as well, and we have more coming. Thank you to everybody who has chosen NodePing for their server and website monitoring. Thank you also to everybody who has given us feedback and suggestions. Please keep them coming!

Filed under Uncategorized

When 200 Isn’t Enough

2011/12/09 by Leave a Comment

Website monitoring seems like a simple thing.  Most HTTP checks look for a response in the 200-399 range, 200 being the most common HTTP response meaning “Server responded correctly – here’s the resource you were looking for.”  But if you’re one of the millions of people or businesses that use Joomla, checking for 200 just isn’t enough.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like Joomla.  It’s a fine CMS and I’ve built many custom modules and plugins for it.  There are plenty of great websites running on it.  But you have to keep a close eye out for errors.

Today, one of our clients had an issue with the network storage on their server and the file system was quickly remounted in read-only mode.  This is expected and even prescribed behavior for mount point errors.  But MySQL, the database, didn’t like not being able to write to its tables and logs and quickly failed.  That, in turn, took the public website offline.  Joomla presented a big white page with the error message Database Error: Unable to connect to the database:Could not connect to MySQL.  The site was not working as expected… surely the website monitoring service would send an alert!  Nope.  The database access error was returned with an HTTP status of 200.  The web server was saying “Everything’s OK.”  No alert was sent from the basic HTTP check.  How embarrassing is it to get the news that your website is down on a call from a customer?

With NodePing, you can use our HTTP Content checks to make sure this doesn’t happen to your Joomla (or other CMS) site.  It works by simply searching for particular text within the returned HTML page.  If you add a check that searches for your copyright footer, it will fail as expected if the database is unavailable and the above error message was returned on the check.  You’ll receive your email or SMS notification that it’s down and can react quickly.  Conversely, if you know the exact error you want to avoid, you can run a negative content check so that it will alert you when the response of the check DOES contain the text ‘Database Error’.

With today’s complex web applications depending on many moving parts, it’s not enough to just check for a 200 response from a web server.  You have to dig deeper, and NodePing has just the shovel you need.

Filed under Monitoring, NodePing, Using NodePing Tagged with , ,

Making sure a web site is solid

2011/11/16 by Leave a Comment

There are a lot of things that go into making an Internet business successful. Layout, design, content wording, the effectiveness of graphics and how they are placed, the call to action, SEO, marketing and ads, product placement, pricing, visitor experience, check out processing… not to mention having the right product at the right time. None of that matters at all if your web site isn’t up.

Once you do all the work to get it all working together, you want to make sure it stays that way. Monitoring is a required part of running a solid business. It is a basic part of the infrastructure necessary to make sure your investment is going to continue to work for you. It isn’t something that is really optional when it comes to protecting the work and financial investment you put into building your site.

A server monitoring service checks to make sure things are working properly at all times. It isn’t just about making sure the server is up (although that is important). Monitoring should be comprehensive, and touch each part of your critical business infrastructure. Yes, you need to know if your server is sown. You also need to know if people are seeing database errors, or if their email to your customer service aren’t going through, and if your DNS is working properly. Each piece of your site should be checked to make sure everything is as it should be.

That means that one check on your front page isn’t really enough. Typically, a web site is running some kind of software that provides the framework of the site. Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress are all popular tools for this piece, but there are many others. Some businesses write their own platforms for this piece, but just about everybody uses something (even if it is custom built) that provides the framework for their content. If this piece breaks, it most often won’t show as down to simplistic site checks. The web server will still respond to requests, people will just see an ugly error message instead of your beautiful design. Your monitoring should check to make sure that your page is not just up, but working properly.

In fact, if your site uses several components that all need to be working together to pull off the overall effect, you should monitor each piece. That might consist of a shopping cart component (like osCommerce), a database and module for your inventory and product placements. Your blog needs to be working smoothly. If you serve images or media from a separate service or server you need to keep an eye on that too.

What does this look like in practice? Typically, you’ll want a basic HTTP check to monitor the entry page to your site. Then, you’ll want a content check on an image and other key elements that might break independently. For dynamic content served through modules or integration, you often don’t know in advance what that content will be. For those, a negative content check is in order, watching for an error or for messages like “0 items found.” For each of these checks, you’ll want to tune the timeouts to levels appropriate for your hosting and configuration.

All of this should be easy, and it shouldn’t cost you too much. You should be able to set it up, and then it should just work. This isn’t where you want to spend your time and energy. It should be boring stuff. It should be simple and dependable. If you are a small to medium sized business with a typical web site or three, and you don’t have a team of people dedicated to doing all the stuff we’ve discussed here, you should not have to spend more than twenty dollars a month on monitoring for your entire business infrastructure, and the whole monitoring setup should not take more than a few minutes a month of your time. If your monitoring provider is costing more than that or is more trouble than that, switch to someone else.

Many people think they can get monitoring for free. You can’t. The businesses that offer “free” services are paying ad costs around $10 per visitor to their site to get your “free” business. Don’t believe them when they say you can get a good value for that “free” plan. The “free” plans typically are for very few (usually one) check with a 15 minute or even one hour interval. That doesn’t do anything useful in making sure your site is working for your customers. Monitoring should be inexpensive, but it isn’t really free.

The biggest player on the block is Pingdom. Pingdom’s service is fairly similar to NodePing’s, but the five sites Pingdom provides for $9.95 (as of the date of this post) aren’t enough for your business. As we’ve discussed here, a small business with a web site already needs their 30 site plan for $39.95. As compared to many providers, Pingdom is a good deal. Compare that plan to NodePing’s $10 flat rate plan, and we think the value choice is clear.

Filed under Monitoring, NodePing Tagged with

DNS Monitoring for Both Sides

2011/11/11 by Leave a Comment

DNS monitoring, like a coin, has two sides: “What does my DNS server say?” and “What does ‘public’ DNS say?”  With NodePing server monitoring, you can ask both questions.

Our DNS check allows you to send a query of a specific type to your DNS server (or a public DNS server) and test the response against a string you define.  For example, you can verify that your website domain resolves to your web server’s static IP address and have NodePing send you an email or SMS alert when either the server or the response fails.

DNS queries can be made for the following types and the response verified:

  • A
  • CNAME
  • MX
  • NS
  • PTR
  • SOA
  • TXT

You can find more info on the DNS checks and our other check types in our documentation.

If you don’t have a NodePing account yet, try out our new DNS monitoring checks for free with a 15-day trial.

Filed under DNS, Monitoring, NodePing, NodePing Updates, Using NodePing Tagged with ,

Now with Unlimited International SMS

2011/11/02 by 3 Comments

Until today, NodePing  offered SMS notifications only to US-based numbers. But do not despair, our friends across the great ponds, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added unlimited international SMS notifications to our server monitoring service. Just add your mobile number to your contact record in plus format (example for UK ‘+445555555555′), and then set it as the notification number in your checks. As always, here at NodePing, it doesn’t cost any extra.  Same great service, same great price – you’ve leveled up!

Globally, mobile networks have a lot of variability and it is possible that some carriers won’t work with our SMS initially. If that’s the case with your carrier please let us know and we’ll do what we can to resolve it.

Give us a digital high-five in the comments if you’re glad to see international SMS added to NodePing!

Filed under Monitoring, NodePing, NodePing Updates, Using NodePing Tagged with ,

6 Sources of Residual Income for the Web Developer

2011/09/26 by 2 Comments

Most web developers I know are hired for site creation, or re-creation and when the job is done, that’s the end of the revenue from that client until something is broken or some other change needs to happen. But with a little extra effort on your part, you can transition a ‘project’ client into residual income. Not only will this keep a steady flow of cash coming in, but you’ll be able to more easily maintain those valuable relationships with your clients so when the next site or re-design happens, you’ll be the one they call.

Consider adding or packaging a few of the following ‘services’ with your development pitch.

  1. Hosting
    Chances are, you’re already doing some of this. The ability to hand over a turn-key website solution makes it easy to add the ‘web hosting’ line item to your bill. Given the low cost of shared hosting like Bluehost or  HostGator, you can easily charge a modest monthly hosting fee and make a nice margin on it. If you don’t ‘do’ hosting – sign up as an affiliate on a hosting company you recommend. Affiliate programs typically give you a commission for sending them customers. It’s easy to do and doesn’t cost anything. Heck, the two links in this paragraph are affiliate links – so go sign up! <grin>
  2. Monitoring
    If the site is worth developing and hosting, it’s worth keeping an eye on. No matter who the host is, your client (and you, if you’re hosting it – see #1) should be the first ones to know if it has gone down. Get yourself a website monitoring account at NodePing (come on, you saw that plug coming a mile away). For only $10/month, you can set up 1000 URLs to keep an eye on. Resell some of those checks to your client – charge them whatever you think is fair and they’re willing to pay. Set your client up as a ‘Notifications Only‘ contact and they’ll get an email or SMS whenever the site goes offline – and when it comes back up too. With NodePing’s new public reports, you can create a URL on your branded website and iframe in the public report so your client can bask in the glow of their uptime graph. If you don’t know how to iframe one page into another, you’re not the target audience of this blog post – but just in case, here’s a link on how to iframe.
  3. SSL Certificates
    If your client’s site has a login form, they’ll need an SSL certificate. The ease of wireless ‘sidejacking’ using Firesheep and similar tools, you should know better than to have a non-SSL login form. Like hosting you can either resell SSL certificates directly or sign up to be an affiliate and earn a commission (usually a percentage) of your client’s spending. Unlike hosting, it takes quite a bit more hoop jumping to become a reseller but with the price of certs and the fact that they need to be re-issued on a regular basis it’s worth the effort.
  4. Payment Processing
    The least fun part of developing ecommerce solutions is the payment gateway integration. Typical reseller/affiliate programs with payment gateways include a percentage of the setup fee, a percentage of monthly fee, and even a per-transaction cut. While Braintree is definitely our preferred gateway here at NodePing (great API and low costs), they unfortunately don’t have a reseller/affiliate program so you may want to stick with some of the old guards like Authorize.net.
  5. Backups
    Your client will need ‘offsite’ backups of their sites and databases. Most of the cheaper hosting companies don’t provide adequate backups, which provides you with an opportunity to sell a much-needed service to your client. Drive Headquarters has a generous referral program and offers both client and server backup capabilities that are very script-able. Just be sure you know how to restore the site from those backups.
  6. Timeshare in Vegas
    OK, this one is just for laughs.  Timeshares are like boats – everybody I’ve ever known who bought one, has also sold one.

If you started adding auxillary services like those above, you could easily see a $100/month/client jump in revenue for just a wee bit of your time in administrating… multiply that times your current client base and you just got a nice raise!  Felicidades!

More importantly, providing extra services will help you maintain a relationship with your client, so the next time they need a $7k makeover on their site, yours is the only bid they’ll consider… after all, you’re doing so much for them already.

So there are 5 ways you can leverage your web development relationship with your client into a bit of residual income.  It’s by no means an exhaustive list.  If you’ve got better channels for residual income or maybe just excellent suggestions for the resell-able or referr-able services listed above, share it with us in the comments.

Filed under Monitoring, Web Development Tagged with , , ,

Adding Notification Only Contacts

2011/09/22 by Leave a Comment

NodePing’s monitoring service is gaining popularity with companies that in turn provide online services such as hosting and network services to small businesses. NodePing works really well for these companies, because they can monitor a large number of their own customers sites and networks at one incredibly low cost. In fact, the cost of doing the same thing with most other services would run them several times as much. This enables our customers to bundle our monitoring as a part of the services that they can provide to their own customers in a very economical way, increasing their service value at low cost. That’s a win for everybody. This group of our customers have been asking us to add features to our service that makes this work even better for them, and we have been working to do just that.

The other day we added public reports to our list of features. Today we’re adding the ability to create contacts that receive notifications, but do not have a login to the NodePing app. Together, these features allow a provider to assign their customers to receive notifications and see uptime reports without access to the providers NodePing account information.

Seeing our monitoring services in use by other service providers to enhance their own offerings is exciting for us, and we plan to continue to add enhancements for this audience. As always, your feedback is welcome.

Filed under Monitoring, NodePing Updates Tagged with , ,

Public status reports of monitoring results

2011/09/16 by Leave a Comment

One of the features that we get asked about fairly often is public reports for monitoring results. It has been on our todo list from the start, and starting today they are available.

Of course, not every check on your list is something you want out in public. So this feature can be turned on individually for each check. Each check that you enable for public reports will have its own URL.

We’ve intentionally made these reports fairly plain, without much branding. This makes them suitable for framing or other methods you could use to embed them in your own site.

These reports will see further enhancements in the near future. As always your feedback is welcome.

Filed under NodePing Updates Tagged with , ,

US SMS? Yeah, we got that…

2011/09/14 by Leave a Comment

You asked for it…

For our US customers NodePing now offers unlimited SMS as part of the $10/month plan.  And you thought we couldn’t pack any more value in there!

All you need to do is add your 10-digit phone number to your contact record and to your check notifications and those important UP/DOWN messages will flow directly to your phone.

For customers outside the US, we’re working on direct SMS integration and hope to implement it in the near future.  Until then, please continue to use the email-to-SMS gateway addresses provided by your mobile carrier.  If your mobile operator isn’t listed at the link provided, please contact them directly and ask what your email-to-SMS address is.

Filed under Uncategorized

Eight things you could do with monitoring checks on 1000 targets

2011/09/08 by 1 Comment

With NodePing, you get checks on up to 1000 targets or services for one flat rate. NodePing’s 1000 service limit is designed to take the lid off of the kinds of limitations you might face with other service providers that charge more for adding checks or services. Once more checks don’t cost you more, what could you do with them? Every once in a while one of our customers has that moment where they realize how much they can do with NodePing that they couldn’t do when adding check targets raised the price. Here are eight things 1000 check targets can allow you to do that you might not do on other services.

  1. Monitor all your web sites and all basic services. OK, this one isn’t very creative, but it has to be said. If you are responsible for your business’s web sites then you need to know if they are down. Web sites that are down are not generating revenue, or if they are internal sites are not enabling your business to operate. If a site is worth having, then it is worth monitoring. This is the main reason people use monitoring in the first place. This goes beyond just web sites. If you are responsible to make sure that a service is available to customers or employees, you should monitor it so that you know immediately if it is unavailable, before someone complains.
  2. Our tongue-in-cheek tag line is “All your nodes are pinged by us,” but why not? With NodePing, now you can ping them all. If you don’t need notifications on all of them, just turn that off on a host by host basis, but you’ll have availability and uptime stats on everything.
  3. Monitor that a web page is showing the right information. This is called a web content check. Some web applications and content systems don’t return a proper 404 error, so to a normal HTTP check the page might appear to be up. A HTTP Content check makes sure the site is up by checking that it contains what you are expecting it to contain. It is often good to set the content to be checked as something that appears in all your pages, such as your copyright statement. This way if the text on the page changes during the normal course of business, your check will still pass.
  4. Monitor that the wrong text isn’t appearing on the page. Some web pages contain dynamic text. This is particularly the case for pages that show feeds, or your most recent news items. We’ve all gone to a site that should have a page with a list of articles or posts, but instead shows a database error or some kind of “No articles found” message. If that’s not what you want people to see, but you don’t know what text to check for because you don’t know what articles will appear, a check that makes sure the page does not contain specific text is the way to go.
  5. Along the same lines, since you have plenty of checks you might want more than one check on the same URL. If you need to watch for more than one error message, or check that multiple widgets or blocks on the page are populating correctly, why not check them all?
  6. Simple cron replacement. Many times web applications have a process that needs to run every so often, maybe every hour or every minute. These are often accessible by hitting a URL. This is often done by using curl or wget in a cron job, but it is easier to set up a check to hit the URL at the right interval. We use this to keep couchdb views fresh. Similarly, it can be used to replace Drupal’s cron job requirements.
  7. Check API’s and other HTTP interfaces. These often don’t get monitored, but they can be a key piece of your business. The HTTP Content check doesn’t care what kind of body the response has, and it will happily check for your text in JSON or XML as well as in HTML. You can monitor that a CouchDb server is saying “Welcome,” for example, or hit a URL that returns a reduced view and look for the value you expect in the results. The same idea applies to SOAP interfaces as well.
  8. Monitor other monitoring. Many systems have a status page that says how services on that host are doing. Frequently they’ll have an OK message, or an ERROR message will appear when things go wrong. HTTP Content checks can be used to watch these pages and send notifications if the wrong thing appears or does not appear on those pages. Both the “Contains” and “Does not contain” options for content checks are useful on this one.

There are many more things you could do with 1000 checks that you might not even consider doing with other services. We plan to add more check types to increase the utility of the service even more. What other things could you think of doing if you aren’t limited by artificial constraints imposed by services that charge by the target service or URL?

Filed under Monitoring, NodePing, Using NodePing Tagged with , ,

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