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 , , ,

Webhook Notifications

2013/01/04 by Leave a comment

We’re glad to announce the addition of a webhook notification type to NodePing.

Webhooks allow you to configure our service to hit a URL when a server goes down and when it comes back up. You can configure webhooks to automate actions when a service fails or comes back online. Common uses include changing DNS settings when a server goes offline and restarting a database when it fails.

Webhooks are available as a notification type for contacts. Create a new webhook by adding a line to the contact with the full URL as the ‘address’ and select ‘webhook’ as the type. You can then add the webhook to the notification section of any of your checks.

The webhook sends an HTTP GET request to the URL you specify. You can add basic authentication and a query string in the URL. Additional information about the check, the result, and the event (up,down,first) will be injected into the query string as well. For a full list of the fields passed to webhooks, see our documentation.

Webhook notifications are now available on all Provider plans. If you’d like to use webhooks but are currently on a different plan, you can upgrade in the billing tab of our control panel. If you don’t have a NodePing account yet, please sign up for a free 15-day trial of our Provider plan at NodePing.com.

Filed under NodePing Updates, Notifications Tagged with ,

SMTP Check Enhancements

2013/01/02 by Leave a comment

We’ve rolled out some important enhancements to our SMTP check that will help ensure your email server is running as it should be.

Added enhancements include:

  • Non-standard ports
  • SSL/TLS support including certificate verification and expiration warning
  • STARTTLS support
  • AUTH with support for PLAIN, LOGIN, and CRAM-MD5
  • Mail acceptance verification including open relay notification

The SMTP check will now not only verify that your email server is running but can also optionally check to see if your server is an open relay or properly accepting mail for a particular email address.

The new open relay functionality will test to see if your mail server will accept mail for an address that should not be allowed. If your server is an open relay, we will send you a notification.

It’s also important to verify that your email server is not rejecting mail that it should be accepting. There are many reasons an SMTP server may reject email. The configuration may have changed or a particular mailbox may be over its quota. This enhancement verifies that your server will accept messages to an email address of your choice and send you a notification if it is rejected.

We’ve added extensive SSL/TLS support including STARTTLS as well as certificate verification and certificate expiration warnings. Simply set how many days in advance of the expiration you would like to be notified and we’ll send you an alert, giving you time to renew and install your new certificates.

The new optional AUTH support allows you to verify that users can log in and send mail using industry standard PLAIN, LOGIN, and CRAM-MD5 AUTH mechanisms.

You can find more information about our new SMTP check enhancements in our documentation.

These enhancements are available now to all NodePing customers. If you don’t currently have an account, please sign up for our free 15 day trial.

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

SSL Check Now Supports SNI and UCC Certificates

2012/11/26 by Leave a comment

We’re happy to announce a couple of enhancements to our SSL certificate check. We now support SNI and UCC certificates

SNI (Server Name Indication) passes the hostname to the server when we request the certificate. That allows you to serve multiple SSL certificates on a single IP address.

UCC (Unified Communications Certificates) allow you use one certificate for multiple hostnames. Unlike wildcard certificates, which NodePing has supported from the beginning, UCC certificates can cover multiple hostnames on multiple domains.

As IPV4 addresses keep getting scarcer, the ability to monitor your SNI and UCC certificates for validity and expiration dates will become increasingly more important. NodePing is glad to be able to offer reliable monitoring for these SSL types.

If you’re not already a NodePing customer, please sign up for our free trial and see how SNI and UCC certificate monitoring can be easy and economical.

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

NodePing site update

2012/11/20 by Leave a comment

We updated the web application that provides the front end to our website and server monitoring service today. Most of the changes to the site are incremental improvements. Most notably, we’ve been working on our billing system to make it more flexible and support tiered billing.

At the same time, we have made a minor adjustment to our Terms of Service. Ironically, the change to our Terms of Service is about changes to the Terms of Service. In light of some recent news stories about other companies, we wanted to make it clear that our ToS can change, but that changes impact you when you have actual notice of the change. We don’t have any intention of sneaking in changes that materially alter what you agreed to when you signed up without giving you notice and a chance to decide if you wish to continue to use the service.

We will continue to work on improving and extending our service. NodePing is already an outstanding monitoring service and an excellent value. We are committed to providing the best monitoring service for the best price. We think we are already doing that, and we plan to make it continually better yet.

Your feedback, as always, is welcome both here in the comments, on our Contact page, or in email to support@nodeping.com.

Filed under Announcement, NodePing Updates

New Performance Summary Report and Updated Public Reports

2012/09/07 by 1 Comment

Web site developers spend a significant amount of time and effort optimizing the site so that it loads quickly and performs well for their visitors. All of that effort is wasted if the web server performs poorly. One of the key uses for website monitoring is keeping an eye on web server performance to make sure that piece of the visitor’s experience is working optimally.

NodePing Monitoring Results Summary ReportWe have implemented a new report to help with this task. The Performance Summary report shows the minimum, maximum, and average response time for a site over an hour. By default, the report shows the last 31 days of performance data. As with the results report, you can change the number of results shown by editing the number on the report’s URL.

Of course, this isn’t limited to just web site performance. This report is available for all monitoring on NodePing, so you can see the same thing for ping results, ssh checks, email checks, and the whole range of other service monitoring we provide. In particular, this type of information is useful in ping tests to routers to watch connectivity performance over time.

We have also adjusted the way our “Public” reports feature works. The summary and results reports are now available if you are logged in to your NodePing account, even if the “Public” access is turned off. The “Public” toggle still controls whether the report is visible to visitors who are not logged in. We also changed the URL’s to better reflect that it is the same report with a different format. The results reports are now all at /reports/results/ (although the old URL’s will continue to work). You can retrieve the data in JSON or CSV format by adding ?format=csv or ?format=json to the URL. For CSV output, you can add a file name to the URL as well for convenience (so the URL would end in /filename.csv?format=csv). Documentation can be found in our reports documentation.

We are continuing to work on improving and expanding our reports. Please let us know what you think, and what you want to be able to see from the monitoring reports. Our continuing goal is to make NodePing not only the most cost effective, but also the most useful monitoring service anywhere.

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

Twitter Notifications

2012/09/06 by 3 Comments

NodePing is happy to announce our newest notification method – twitter direct messages.  The ability to receive a twitter direct message is a great addition to our current notification system that already includes unlimited email, international SMS, and voice calls.

Twitter notifications are in testing at this point.  They are available on all accounts so please do kick the tires and let us know how things work for you at support@nodeping.com.

You’ll need to follow @NodePing in order to get direct message alerts.  Then add your twitter handle in your contact record and in your check’s notification section and we’ll send you a private and discrete ‘direct message’ (not an embarrassing public tweet) when that check goes down and again when it comes back up.

Let us know in the comments how this new notification type is working for you and what you’d like to see added next – instant message (IM), HTTP POST to url, carrier pigeon, etc?

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

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