Adding Probes to North America and Europe along with an IP Change [BR]

NodePing continues to grow!
We’re adding two new probes in the North America region one to the Europe region.

Las Vegas, Nevada (US) – NV (208.66.75.231)
Seattle, Washington (US) – WA (162.210.249.48)
Madrid, Spain (ES) – ES (94.46.242.178)

In addition, we have one IP change to our current probe in Brazil:
BR will change from 177.54.149.101 to 177.67.81.184

These changes will take place 2014-07-02. Please update your firewalls appropriately.

As always, a current list of all the IP addresses for our probe servers can be found in the FAQ.

[UPDATE – 2014-07-02 09:48GMT-6] – New probes are online and IP change for BR complete

Heartbleed Statement

Many of you are scrambling to mitigate the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability (CVE-2014-0160) with your list of vendors and services. You can check NodePing off that list.

NodePing’s SSL services (including our website, user interfaces, API, and client checks) were all unaffected by the Heartbleed vulnerability.

Our application and service is based on Node.js and in a stroke of dumb luck or serendipitous genius the core developers had chosen over a year ago to disable the ‘heartbeat’ functionality in the Node.js implementation of SSL. Thank you, core devs!

Please contact support if you have any further questions.

New Latin America Region

We’re excited to announce we’re adding a new check region and probe servers in Latin America to the NodePing server monitoring service.
The new region will be brought online and available for selection starting April 2, 2014. With this new addition, NodePing now has four distinct check regions, North America (NAM), Europe (EUR), East Asia/Oceania (EAO), and Latin America (LAM).

The new probe servers are located in:NodePing probe map

  • Panama [PA]
  • Curico, Chile [CL]
  • Federal, Argentina [AR]
  • São Paulo, Brazil [BR]
  • Miami, Florida, USA [FL]

Some may be asking “Why is Miami included in the Latin America Region?”. Geography was never our strong subject, but we do understand Miami is in North America. Significant traffic within different parts of Latin America goes through Miami, especially between Central America and South America, so we wanted to ensure that was covered for our Latin American customers.

You can specify our new Latin America region as the default region on your account or select it as a location on individual checks to get results from these new probe servers.

IP addresses for the probe servers can be found in the FAQ. Any questions can be directed to support(at)nodeping.com

[UPDATE – 2014-04-02 08:20GMT-7] – All new Latin America probes are online.

WebSocket Monitoring

We’re happy to announce a new check type that can monitor the uptime and optionally the response of your WebSocket services, including Socket.io.

WebSocket checks can monitor the availability of RFC-6455 and Socket.io (0.9.X) compatible WebSocket services. We use WebSockets here at NodePing to communicate between various servers. WebSockets are also commonly used as a low-overhead communication between the browser and web servers. One the greatest features of WebSockets is their ability to send information from the server to the browser without the browser asking for each piece individually, or having to handle each piece of data as a separate connection as popular polling methods must do. WebSockets are increasingly common for web applications and other cloud based services, but until now there hasn’t been a good way to monitor the availability of your WebSocket based services.

WebSocket URIs look a bit different from other protocols as they start with either “ws” or “wss”. “wss” is used for SSL connections. Socket.io requires some session information from an HTTP handshake before the WebSocket can connect so they start with “http” or “https”.

WebSocket checks are available to all NodePing accounts. Full documentation can be found here. If you’re not a NodePing customer yet, please sign up for our 15-day free trial.

We’d love to hear what kind of checks you need for your infrastructure. Send us your requests or leave a comment below.

Replacing probe server [CZ] with [IT] in EUR region and IP changes for [AU], [TX] and [NJ]

Due to continued connectivity issues with our probe in  Zlin, Czech Republic [CZ], we’re replacing it with a new probe server in Milan, Italy [IT]. The new server will be brought online 2014-03-03.

Adding – Milan, Italy (IT) – IT (194.14.179.117)
Removing – Zlin, Czech Republic (CZ) – CZ (50.7.228.37)

Additionally, the IP address for the current probes listed below will also be changing on  2014-03-03.

AU will change from 103.4.17.197 to 103.25.58.108
TX will change from 204.11.60.100 to 23.92.75.43
NJ will change from 192.3.25.36 to 185.35.78.51

Please update your firewalls appropriately.

A current and always up-to-date list of all the IP addresses for our probe servers can be found in the FAQ.

[UPDATE – 2014-03-03 08:37GMT-7] – All new probes and IP changes have completed.

NodePing mobile push notifications to wake you up!

We’re pleased to announce another new notification type for NodePing server monitoring. You can now receive persistent push notifications through Pushover on your iOS or Android device.

Once configured, each ‘down’ event for your check will push an ’emergency’ notification to your device and automatically re-alert every 30 seconds until it is acknowledged, up to 5 minutes.  Try sleeping through that!

Pushover notifications are faster and more reliable than SMS and are currently the only NodePing notification type that will persistently re-alert you when a check fails. Please consider switching your SMS alerts to Pushover alerts. It will also help us keep NodePing prices down as Pushover alerts are significantly cheaper than international SMS.

Once installed, simply add your Pushover ‘user key’ as a ‘Pushover’ notification type in your contact record and select that key when creating or editing a NodePing check.

For those who may be interested in viewing your check status in a native iOS app, one of our customers has created HostCheck using our API.

Let us know in the comments what NodePing feature you’ve been itching to see.

How to integrate PagerDuty into NodePing

Many of our customers are also big PagerDuty fans. What’s not to like! PagerDuty offers great escalation and on-call hand-off capabilities as well as flexible voice, sms, and even pajama alerts.

To make it easier for you to integrate your already existing PagerDuty workflow, we’ve added a new contact notification type to NodePing. The ‘PagerDuty’ type accepts a ‘Service API Key’. You can find information on how to set up a PagerDuty generic API service at their support site.

Our system will send a ‘trigger’ event on each failure and a ‘resolve’ event on each recovery. Add an entry in your contact record by specifying your PagerDuty ‘Service API Key’ (they kind of look like a big random string “47b3a13848514c3fa3def842464eeaa8”) and selecting ‘PagerDuty’ in the notification type drop down. Then specify that contact when you edit or create your NodePing checks.

pagerduty

You can specify as many different PagerDuty contacts as you like. This allows you to use multiple ‘Services’ with NodePing and have full control of your PagerDuty escalations and notifications.

We strive to bring you the best solutions for your monitoring needs. We’ve set our eyes on Android and iOS push notifications next so follow this blog for that notification. We’d also love to hear from you. What notification types or other features would you like to see in NodePing?

If you’re not a NodePing customer yet, you can sign up for a free 15-day trial and kick the tires for yourself. We’re confident you’ll like what you find.

Adding Probes to NAM Region and IP Changes [LD] and [CA]

We’re excited to announce the addition of two more probe servers in the North America (NAM) region. They will be brought online 2014-01-20.

Denver, Colorado (US) – CO (162.211.64.212)
Chicago, Illinois (US) – IL (162.211.66.130)

Additionally, the IP address for the current probes listed below will also be changing on  2014-01-20.

LD will change from 5.2.16.253 to 78.157.217.106
CA will change from 98.143.145.67 to 23.94.101.96

Please update your firewalls appropriately.

We continue to strive to bring you the most reliable and economical server monitoring anywhere.

A current and updated list of all the IP addresses for our probe servers can be found in the FAQ.

[UPDATE – 2014-01-20 10:29GMT-7] – All new probes and IP changes have completed.

New East Asia/Oceania Region

We’re excited to announce we’re adding a new check region and probe servers in East Asia/Oceania to the NodePing server monitoring service.

The new region will be brought online and available for selection starting January 6, 2014. With this new addition, NodePing now has three distinct check regions, North America (NAM), Europe (EUR), and East Asia/Oceania (EAO).
NodePing Regions
The new probe servers are located in:

  • Sydney, Australia [AU]
  • Singapore [SG]
  • Hong Kong [HK]
  • Tokyo, Japan [JP]

IP addresses for the new probe servers can be found in the FAQ. Any questions can be directed at support(at)nodeping.com

[UPDATE – 2014-01-06 08:52GMT-7] – All four new probe servers in the EAO region are online and operational.

 

IP Address Changes – [LD]

Our probe server in London, United Kingdom [LD] will be changing IP addresses on 2013/12/09:
LD will change from 109.73.168.10 to 5.2.16.253.

No data loss is expected. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Please adjust your firewalls appropriately so your checks are not blocked.

A current and updated list of all the IP addresses for our probe servers can be found in the FAQ.

[UPDATE – 2013-12-09 13:29GMT-7] – LD IP address change complete