Webhooks for Business Plan Customers

2013/03/19 by Leave a comment

At NodePing we are constantly striving to provide the best server monitoring service at absolutely the best price we can. Our goal is to be as useful as we can to meet your day to day monitoring needs for both web and server monitoring, at a price that removes all barriers for best practice monitoring for every service, everywhere.

In line with that goal, today we are changing the Business plan to add unlimited webhook notifications. Previously those were only available in the Provider plan.

Webhooks allow you to trigger actions on other sites based on events from NodePing’s monitoring system. This allows you to automate actions on your servers when a web site goes up or down. Common uses include changing DNS settings when a server goes offline and restarting a database when it fails.

Our hope is that including webhooks in the Business plan will make NodePing’s most popular plan even more useful for businesses the world over. A lot of what we do is based on feedback, so please continue to let us know how we can continue to make our service fit your needs even better.

Filed under Announcement, Using NodePing Tagged with

HTTP Parse Check – Monitor Anything!

2013/02/27 by Leave a comment

Most of the checks that we have released for NodePing to date have monitored specific Internet-based services. These are very useful, and they are the bread and butter of traditional web site and server monitoring services. Today we’re really excited to announce the release of our “Monitor Anything” check. You can use it to monitor… well, just about about anything.

The new check is the HTTP Parse check. It connects to a remote HTTP service and parses the response for specific fields and values. The values are then stored in the check results for reports. If any of the values are outside of your configured ranges, it triggers a notification via email, SMS, twitter, voice call, or webhook.

The HTTP Parse check can look for named fields in text or a JSON response. For example, if the check is configured to look for a field named “llamas” and the response contains llamas: 34 then the system will store 34 as the value, which will be displayed on reports and charts.

Similarly, the response could be in JSON format. For example, the JSON could be something like this: {"animals": {llamas": 34}} Configuring the check to look for animals.llamas will store 34 in the check results. The check can handle multiple fields, as long as they are all accessible from one request to a URL, and it can pull values from the middle of a larger response.

What could this check be used for? Anything that is accessible by an HTTP request that returns a field with a numeric value. Since it is parsing the response for the field name and value, it can be embedded in other data. This means that any JSON API or data service on the Internet is potentially a target for this.

Sample Server Load OutputOur use of this check at NodePing is to monitor server health. As you can imagine, running a service like NodePing means we have a number of servers all over the place. We use this check to monitor server load, free memory and disk space on a number of our servers.

There are many ways to generate the system information from a host so it can be used for this check. Some of the ones we’ve tried include Linfo and phpSysInfo. We wanted a similar tool written in Node.js, so we wrote npsystats, which is what we now use for our systems. We’ll have more to say about npsystats in the near future. There are a number of other similar tools out there, such as Ohai in Ruby. The HTTP Parse check is capable of working well with most of them.

For example, we have a check on a web server that monitors server load. npsystats returns the following json in response to the check’s HTTP GET request:
{"load":{"1min":1.86376953125,"5min":0.9501953125,"10min":0.64404296875}}
The check is set to watch three fields: load.1min, load.5min, load.10min, with a range of 0 to 8 (it could be different for each field, but it doesn’t have to be). So if the load on this server goes over 8, I will get an email. I also can access a graph showing the 1, 5, and 10 minute load for this server.

More information can be found in our documentation for the HTTP Parse Check. We think this makes NodePing an even more awesome piece of your system monitoring and automation toolkit, particularly when tied to judicious use of notifications and webhooks. If you don’t have an account on NodePing yet, try it out with our 15 day free trial.

Filed under HTTP Parse, System Monitoring Tagged with ,

Email monitoring done right

2013/02/25 by Leave a comment

For several years before starting NodePing I worked in a number of different roles in IT, including system administration, project management, infrastructure and network management, and development. A sizable chunk of that time was spent at an organization that ran email servers in a number of different countries scattered around the world. Making sure that all of those email systems were working properly and generating useful reporting was a huge challenge, and involved a lot of repetitive manual steps.

Availability report outputNodePing’s monitoring services were largely motivated by the desire to make widespread monitoring of web sites and other Internet accessible services as simple and automatic as possible. One of the reasons I’m so excited about our suite of email monitoring checks is that I know from personal experience how important these tools are, both from a sys admin’s point of view as well as from technical management roles.

The core of this set of tools is SMTP monitoring. This check has several options that allow you to check the remote SMTP server in a variety of ways. At its most basic, it can be used to check that the server is operating and answering to SMTP connections and is accessible. It can also watch the SSL/TLS certificates, and notify you in advance of when certificates will expire. The check also can be used to monitor if the SMTP server accepts or denies specific email addresses, which can be used for open relay monitoring. Authentication verification can make sure that the server is logging people in properly. This is particularly important when email servers are integrated with separate directory services, such as an LDAP service or Active Directory.

SMTP server monitoring should also be paired with RBL monitoring. This checks the server’s address against a number of different RBL services, and can notify you if the server has been blacklisted. Any experienced email administrator knows that staying off of these lists is critically important, and it is possible to get on a black list without doing anything outside of normal business practices. When it happens you need to know quickly so you can remedy or clarify the situation and get off of the black list before it negatively impacts business.

The IMAP and POP checks go hand in hand with the SMTP check to ensure that your customers and employees can retrieve mail from their inboxes. Like the SMTP check, these checks not only monitor that the server is accepting connections, but can verify authentication and warn you in advance if an SSL certificate is nearing expiration.

The final piece of the email service monitoring tool set is monitoring the web interface. Here NodePing’s HTTP Content check can be used to make sure that the service is responding with the proper web page, and the SSL check can verify that the web interface’s SSL certificate is in place and working properly, as well as warn of a nearing expiration date.

These checks together provide a full complement of tools for monitoring email services. For most systems, we’d suggest a full set of checks:

  • The SMTP service is operating properly on port 25, accept a STARTTLS command, accepts authentication, and accepts a given address for relay from an authenticated user. All of this, with verification of the TLS certificate, can be done with one check.
  • The SMTP service is listening and accepting SSL based connections on port 587.
  • The SMTP service rejects open relay requests.
  • The SMTP service accepts a local address from non-authenticated hosts.
  • The server is not on any RBL’s.
  • The IMAP server is operating properly on port 143 and authenticating properly
  • The IMAP server is operating properly on port 993 and the SSL certificate is good
  • The POP server is operating properly on port 110 and authenticating properly
  • The POP server is operating properly on port 995 and the SSL certificate is good
  • The web interface is operating properly on port 80 (if that is supported)
  • The web interface is operating properly on port 443 and the certificate is good.

This is a long way from a check that just monitors if a port is listening somewhere. It is the full set of checks that together help to ensure a healthy email system. We continue to extend our monitoring service and make our checks smarter, with the goal to take as much of the manual busy work out of the hands of busy administrators and allow them to focus on tasks that use their actual skills.

If you are responsible for email servers and haven’t added NodePing’s monitoring to your tool set yet, sign up for our free trial and give a try!

Filed under Email, POP, RBL, SMTP, SSL, Using NodePing Tagged with ,

Don’t let your certificate expirations catch you offguard

2013/02/23 by Leave a comment

Microsoft’s recent slipup with a certificate that caused outages for the Azure service is a reminder for the rest of us to make sure we are keeping a close eye on certificate expirations. Having a certificate expire on you makes you company look really inept, but in practice keeping track of certificates and when they expire can be a pain if you are trying to do it manually. A system that monitors certificates and reminds you before they will expire can be an excellent way to avoid having this happen to you, and is much easier than tracking them in a spreadsheet or sticky notes.

NodePing provides a few different ways to keep ahead of certificate expirations. For web servers, we have an SSL Check specifically designed to check the validity of SSL certificates and warn you a set number of days before they expire. You can set the number of days to anything that is useful for you. We typically suggest a couple of weeks in advance of the expiration.

Certificate expirations can also hit other types of services as well. Our email checks (SMTP, POP, and IMAP) can verify the SSL/TLS certificates used by each of these servers. Similar to the SSL check for web services, these checks verify that the SSL certificate is valid and working, and also can be set to warn you a certain number of days before they expire.

Tracking your certificates can be a pain, but it doesn’t have to be. Using an automated monitoring system like NodePing for SSL Certificate monitoring can make the task easy and painless, and let you focus on more interesting things.

Filed under SSL, Using NodePing Tagged with , ,

IP Address Change – [NL]

2013/01/17 by Leave a comment

Our probe server in the Netherlands will be changing IP addresses on 2013/01/18:
From 46.249.62.70 to 46.249.33.15

We apologize for any inconvenience. It’s a forced server move from our host there.

Please adjust your firewalls appropriately so your checks are not blocked.

[UPDATE – 2013-01-18] – The change is complete.

Filed under Announcement, IP Change, NodePing Updates Tagged with ,

SIP Monitoring

2013/01/17 by 1 Comment

If you run SIP servers, you’ll be pleased as punch to know we’ve just released a new SIP server monitoring check just for you. Now you can be alerted if your SIP server goes offline or isn’t responding to SIP commands.

SIP stands for “Session Initiation Protocol,” and refers to a signaling protocol that can run over TCP or UDP and is commonly used for voice and video communications. SIP servers are often the connection points for VOIP calls.

The check does not initiate a call, but rather tests that the the server accepts a SIP connection by sending the OPTIONS command and watching for the response. Even if your server does not support the OPTIONS command and returns an error, this indicates that the server is up and operating, so the check succeeds. You can find more information about this check in our SIP Check documentation.

This new SIP check is available today for all NodePing accounts. If you don’t have a server monitoring account with NodePing yet, head on over and sign up for our free 15-day trial.

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

RBL Monitoring

2013/01/15 by Leave a comment

What better way to top off our email monitoring enhancements than with a new check type! We’re happy to introduce our RBL check.

RBL, or DNSBL, stands for “Real-time Black List,” and is used to publish the addresses of computers or networks linked to spamming, malware, or other abuses which system administrators may want to block from accessing their networks.

There are hundreds of RBLs in existence, which use a wide array of criteria for listing and delisting of addresses. These may include listing the addresses of zombie computers or other machines being used to send spam, listing the addresses of ISPs who willingly host spammers, or listing addresses which have sent spam to a honeypot system.

If the IP addresses of your servers appear on these RBLs, there’s a good chance you’ll have difficulty interacting with networks that subscribe to these RBLs. For instance, if your SMTP server is listed, you’ll likely be unable to send email to the systems that use the RBL you are listed on.

You can use our new RBL check to ensure that your servers aren’t listed and to receive notifications if they do get listed, allowing you to quickly take steps to remove your addresses from those RBLs. You can find more details about which RBLs we check and how to set them up in our RBL Check documentation.

Adding RBL checking to our already robust email monitoring checks for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 will help you sleep at night knowing that email is flowing as it should be.

RBL monitoring checks are available to all NodePing accounts. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up for your free 15-day trial of our server monitoring service.

Filed under Email, Monitoring, NodePing Updates, RBL, SMTP Tagged with , , , ,

New Uptime Reporting

2013/01/14 by Leave a comment

Recently we have been working on some of our reports. As a part of that process, we are releasing a new uptime report. The report allows you to see uptime statistics for an individual monitor grouped by days or months. This allows you to get accurate reporting for any check for any given month for which data is in our database.

You can set arbitrary date ranges for the report. This report is publicly available if you have public reporting turned on for the check. As with our other reports, it is available in a web page, as JSON, or CSV format. The report is described in more detail in our report documentation.

The same uptime data is also available through the API.

We will be adding additional views of this data in the near future.

Filed under NodePing Updates Tagged with , ,

POP Monitoring Enhancements

2013/01/10 by Leave a comment

As part of strengthening our email server monitoring solutions, we’ve added a bunch of new features to the POP3 check type. They nicely complement our recent changes to our SMTP and IMAP checks.

New features include:

  • Non-standard ports. Specify any port, not just POP default port 110
  • SSL/TLS support on any port – not just 995.
  • SSL certificate validation
  • SSL certificate expiration warnings – configurable to X days before expiration
  • User login verification.

More details about the new POP server monitoring enhancements can be found in our documentation.

These features are available to all NodePing server monitoring accounts today. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up for a free 15-day trial at https://nodeping.com.

Now, if you just had a way to monitor spam blacklists for your server ip addresses… RBL Check is on its way!

Filed under Monitoring, NodePing Updates, POP, SSL Tagged with , , , ,

IMAP Monitoring Enhancements

2013/01/09 by Leave a comment

On the heels of our SMTP enhancement release, we’re happy to add some significant features to our IMAP server monitoring check. IMAP refers to one of the two most popular methods of email retrieval, the other being POP. IMAP4 services are supported by nearly all email clients and its use continues to grow.

We’ve added the following enhancements:

  • Non-standard ports. Specify any port, not just IMAP default port 143
  • SSL/TLS support.
  • SSL certificate validation
  • SSL certificate expiration warnings – configurable to X days before expiration
  • User login verification.

It’s easier than ever to ensure your IMAP services are available and configured correctly. Find more information about the new enhancements in our documentation.

The new IMAP enhancements are available to all NodePing accounts today. If you don’t have a NodePing server monitoring account yet you can sign up for a free 15-day trial.

Next check on the block for more enhancements – you guessed it – POP3. I hear there’s a RBL check in the works too! Keep an eye out here on the blog for the announcements.

Filed under Email, IMAP, Monitoring, NodePing Updates Tagged with , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →