Beyond “Is It Up?” – Website Monitoring should be Comprehensive

2023/09/05 by Leave a comment

When it comes to monitoring websites, the question most often asked is, “Is the site up?” While this is certainly an essential aspect, the answer hardly paints the whole picture. True website monitoring involves a plethora of factors that can affect the user experience and performance. These factors can often be hidden, and your user’s experience of you site might not be the same as what you are seeing from your network. With NodePing’s suite of tools, you have the ability to dig deep and understand the vital aspects of your website’s functionality. Let’s explore these considerations.

DNS Monitoring

Domain Name System (DNS) is the backbone of internet navigation, converting human-friendly URLs into IP addresses. Monitoring DNS health is crucial as an unresponsive DNS can render your site unreachable. Problems with DNS can be hidden by caching, and we are often asked why we are notifying about a site that seems to be working from the owner’s perspective. The answer is often that the site owner’s browser or DNS caching is making the site appear to be working when in fact for people who haven’t been on the site recently it appears to be offline because of DNS problems. NodePing offers robust DNS checks to ensure that your DNS servers are resolving correctly.

Monitoring Status Codes

Like with DNS, just checking with a browser can also miss situations in which the web server is actually responding with an error because the modern browsers try to show the page if they can. We often get messages from customers who’s website appears to be working but is actually returning status codes that indicate errors on the site. Even if the site looks right in your browser at the moment, you need to know if it is returning a status code in the 500 range indicating the server is throwing an error. Many content management systems or frameworks also return a visible page with a 404 Not Found status. NodePing’s HTTP checks watch for status code problems with your site.

Similarly, it is important to know if your site is properly following redirects. On some checks, you want the monitoring to follow the redirect to ensure that is getting the final page, and that page is responding with a 200 status code. You may also want to test specific URL’s for the 302 response as well. NodePing’s HTTP Advanced check allows you to ensure that a URL is returning a specific redirect response code.

SSL Certificate Validation

SSL certificates encrypt data transferred between users and your servers. Monitoring and receiving warnings about certificate expirations help you maintain trust and protect sensitive user information. Many of our check types include SSL validation, and and there is also a specialized SSL check that warns you if a certificate has a problem, as well as notifying you that your certificate will expire in a certain number of days. With NodePing, stay ahead with timely reminders and validations.

Domain Registration Expiration and the WHOIS Check

Keep track of your domain registration status with NodePing’s WHOIS checks. Understanding the ownership and registration details ensures that you stay in control of your domain and can prevent unexpected downtime.

Monitoring Other Services on the Host

If your website relies on additional services like databases or caching servers, monitoring them alongside the main site is essential. Integrating these checks into your monitoring strategy ensures that all parts of your site are functioning seamlessly.

CDN & Proxy Consideration

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and proxies enhance site performance but can complicate monitoring. By monitoring the back-end site directly, NodePing allows you to quickly pinpoint whether the issue lies with the CDN, helping you react quickly to any problems.

Tying It Together

Every notification your receive from your monitoring system should be actionable. Otherwise it becomes noise, and you either waste time or start ignoring alerts and miss important events. It is important to monitor every aspect of your site, but you don’t necessarily want ten notifications when the site is down. NodePing allows you to set a check as being dependent on another check, so you won’t get a stack of notifications if the dependent checks fail together.

Automated Diagnostics

NodePing’s has both on demand and automated diagnostics tools that provide extra insights when your site is down, supplying valuable information to help troubleshoot and resolve issues more efficiently.

Conclusion

Monitoring a website involves much more than merely checking if it’s up. With tools like NodePing, you can dive into a multitude of factors that contribute to your site’s performance and reliability. By understanding and keeping tabs on DNS, redirects, SSL certificates, domain registration, host services, CDN considerations, and more, you ensure a smooth user experience and robust site functionality.

At NodePing, we’re committed to helping you monitor your website from all angles. Get in touch with us to learn how you can take your website monitoring to the next level. If you don’t have an account yet, give it a try with our 15-day, free trial.

Filed under diagnostics, DNS, HTTP, Using NodePing, WHOIS Tagged with , ,

Finding the Best Server Providers

2023/08/01 by Leave a comment

Great services need great boxes to run on. How do we know if a server or VPS host is performant and reliable?

We use dozens of different hosts for NodePing and our standards for performance and reliability are really high. There are many SaaS out there that host only on AWS. Putting all your eggs in one basket is nice for billing but would make our service fragile and vendor-dependent. We spread our boxes around to make it resilient and better represent the Internet’s disperate architecture for monitoring.

We have to take new boxes out and put them through their paces; kick the tires and make sure they’re solid. This is how we test out a new provider before we use a dedicated server or VPS.

Blacklisted

As soon as we have our IP assignments from the provider, we check to make sure the IPs aren’t listed in any spam blacklists using NodePing RBL checks. Most of our hosts don’t send any actual email but our public probes do a lot of SMTP connections to ensure our customers’ mail servers are functioning properly. If the IPs are blacklisted, we’ll need a clean IP from the provider or cancel and look elsewhere.

We’ll leave this RBL check running once an hour to make sure it doesn’t get listed half way through our testing period.

Blacklisted IPs can be a good indicator of provider quality even if the server won’t be sending any email. A provider that can’t keep spammers out of their service is unlikely to be able to keep a reliable network.

Incoming Traffic

Solid networks can be hard to find. We test for inbound packet-loss and routing issues using NodePing PING checks. We’ll sometimes test from a few different geographical regions to ensure global routing is stable. Anything less than 100% uptime for 30 days is unacceptable for us. If the provider had announced planned maintenance well in advance, we’d use NodePing’s maintenance feature to ensure the uptime stats remained accurate despite planned outages. In our decade-plus experience, a network that sees even one episode of packet-loss or route failure is going to continue to see them and isn’t stable enough for our use.

We’ll do the same for IPv6 addresses as routing and packet-loss can be independent of the IPv4 stack. Some providers have a hard time keeping their IPv6 blocks broadcasted and we’ve seen IPv6 completely fail while IPv4 continued to function normally.

We enable automated diagnostics for all our PING checks so we can see where on the route the packet-loss or routing failure is happening. Getting immediate MTRs can show us the weak links in a network and if we see issues with some of the usual suspects, we will for sure dump it. Yes, I’m looking at you, Cogent!

Outbound Traffic

Sometimes a network issue seems to only impact outbound routing. We use the AGENT functionality to assign additional PING checks to originate from the server being tested towards some of the other servers it would be connecting to if it’s moved into production. The AGENT software will run NodePing checks just like the public probes but originating from our test host. It’s a great way to detect outbound packet-loss and routing issues from the server. Again, anything less than 100% uptime on this test and the service isn’t going to make muster.

System Load

The performance of a VPS can be greatly impacted by issues outside our control. Two of the most frequent system load issues we’ve seen on VPS are noisy neighbors and host server backups.

A good provider won’t oversell their VPS host servers and will suspend anyone who is abusing more than their fair share of resources. If we end up on a box with noisy neighbors, the system load on our VPS will likely spike, starving our processes from getting the CPU, memory, networking, or storage I/O they need to function properly.

We’ve also come across providers where we saw system load rise every Saturday around midnight (GMT) for 30 mins or so. Turned out their backup process was overwhelming the disks and causing load issues on all the VPS on the host.

These types of issues are simple to find using PUSH checks that monitor the system load. Since we aren’t using these boxes for anything yet, we have to set the thresholds pretty low to detect load issues caused by resource starvation. This is one test that we’ll give a bit of slack to a provider if it fails though. Noisy neighbors or hungry backups can happen to any provider and we’ll give them a chance to find and address the cause. If it keeps happening though, pull the plug on that provider. It’ll just be worse once you start using the machine and an ongoing headache trying to get their support to do anything about it.

If a server can keep humming along for 30 days without any of the checks above failing, there’s a pretty good chance that provider and network are going to be solid and reliable. I hope this look into our vetting process will help you with your provider search for those elusive reliable networks and servers.

If you don’t yet use NodePing, please sign up for our free, 15-day trial and see for yourself how our monitoring can increase your uptime.

Filed under AGENT, diagnostics, Monitoring, MTR, NodePing, PING, PUSH, RBL, SMTP, System Monitoring, uptime Tagged with , , , , ,

Automated Diagnostics and Sub-minute Intervals

2021/08/24 by

We’ve added a couple of new features to help you reduce downtime by keeping a closer eye on your services and getting you the information you need to troubleshoot when they fail.

Sub-minute Intervals

You can now set your check interval to 15 or 30 seconds. Shorter check intervals can detect and alert you to problems more quickly. The faster we detect it, the faster you can respond, the faster your service recovers.

Additional fees apply.

  • 30 second intervals – $0.20/check/month – only applies to enabled checks set to 30-second interval.
  • 15 second intervals – $0.40/check/month – only applies to enabled checks set to 15-second interval.

Sub-minute interval costs are calculated on active peak-usage, are post-paid, and will be charged on your next month’s invoice.

When seconds count, use sub-minute check intervals.

Automated Diagnostics

When a service fails, the first thing you want know is why.

When you enable Automated Diagnostics for a check, as soon as we detect it down, we’ll give you as much information about the failure as we have in the email notification.

For all check types, we provide any DNS resolution and full error message.

Each check type will have the most relevant data for that type. For example: HTTP-type checks, we give you the full request and response headers along with the first 250kb of data returned, SMTP checks, we provide the full SMTP conversation (commands and responses).

That info is sent in the ‘down’ email notification and saved to the event data so you can see it in the check status report.

We also trigger appropriate diagnostics based on the failure.

For timeouts and connection issues, we run an MTR from each probe that verified the failure so you can quickly see if it’s packet-loss, routing issues, or a firewall causing your service to fail.

For DNS issues, we run dig queries against all the listed nameservers for the FQDN so you can see if any are responding with expired or wrong data.

These automated diagnostic results are recorded in the event data for the check and optionally emailed to the contacts listed on the check as soon as we get the results.

This means you get fast and accurate info to help you troubleshoot, which means quicker interventions and less downtime.

Pricing and Plan Changes

Introduced with these new features is our new NodePing pricing changes and plans.

  • Personal – $10/month
  • Professional – $25/month
  • Premiere – $80/month

Additional pricing info can be found on our pricing page.

This is the second plan/pricing change in NodePing’s 10-year history. The last change was 9 years ago (2012). Our costs have risen over the years and the new features are pricey for us to offer.

Existing customers are grandfathered into their current plans/pricing but can upgrade at any time to get access to these new features.

If you do not yet have a NodePing account, please sign up for our free 15-day trial and see for yourself how these great new features reduce your downtime.

Filed under Announcement, diagnostics, NodePing Updates, Using NodePing Tagged with ,

On-demand Diagnostics API and from AGENT Checks

2020/05/11 by Leave a comment

It isn’t always obvious what’s going on when a check fails and additional information about what our probes are seeing can be helpful for troubleshooting. The NodePing diagnostic tools allow you to run several utilities to get information about what our probes are seeing. Now we’ve brought that functionality to our AGENT checks as well as a new API endpoint.

Diagnostics from AGENTs

You can now connect your AGENT checks to our diagnostics servers to run our most useful tools: mtr, ping, traceroute, and dig. Use the instructions in the AGENT software to run the diagnostic client on your AGENT. Your AGENTs will appear in the ‘location’ dropdown of the Diagnostic Tools in NodePing.

Diagnostics API

On-demand diagnostics can now be requested via our REST API. Your integrations can request NodePing diagnostics from any of our probes as well as from your AGENTs with a simple HTTP request. Please see the diagnostics API documentation for details.

If you don’t have a NodePing account, you can sign up for a free, 15-day trial and experience the fast and accurate service NodePing provides.

Filed under AGENT, Announcement, api, diagnostics, NodePing Updates Tagged with , ,