NodePing Tips – Using the Status Filter

NodePing allows you to watch up to 1000 web sites or services. Some of our customers monitor dozens or even hundreds of web sites. Others monitor several web sites, plus DNS, FTP, SSH, and a variety of other services. The sites and services being monitored are surprisingly varied, and scattered across the globe.

Lately we’ve been working on our UI to make it work better for all of the variations in how the service is used, especially for customers with a larger number of checks. Several enhancements have been made to the main Status list. Putting more information at your fingertips.

One enhancement that is surprisingly powerful is the dynamic filtering of the status list. If you type in the Search box at the top right of the list, the list of checks is dynamically filtered as you type. The filter continues to be applied as the information is updated. This means, for example, that you can type “FAIL” in the search box and it will list only the services that are currently listed as failing. As services change from PASS to FAIL and back, they will appear and disappear from the filtered list dynamically. This gives you an instant list of those services that are failing that you can just keep on your screen and it keeps itself updated.

Another use of the search filter is viewing groups of checks with common attributes. For example, you can view all web site monitoring by typing http in the search, which will display all of the checks with an HTTP type or with “http” in the label. This is even more useful tied to careful use of check labels. If you include the word “router” in the label for all your checks of routers, that makes it very easy to list them together using the search. You could also use this to list monitoring checks of a specific network, client, or location.

The search filter is made possible by the capabilities of the DataTables plugin. Recent versions of DataTables have added some key features that have made our lives much easier in developing a rich interface for our web application.

We hope the new enhancements to our UI make the service even more useful, and we’re looking forward to hearing about the ways people use it that we didn’t think of.