Disable Monitoring

Last week we added several features aimed at making our monitoring service easier to manage and use.  One of those features adds new ways to easily disable checks, either in the UI or using the API. Disabling a check stops all monitoring and notifications. It can be useful to keep scheduled maintenance or downtime from affecting your uptime statistics. I’ll explain a bit on the various ways you can disable monitoring within NodePing.

Disabling a Single Check
There are two ways to disable a single check within the NodePing web interface. The first is in the check details drawer. If you click the name of a check in the list, the details drawer will slide out. There you can see the last 5 results, links to the various reports, and a toggle to disable the check. Simply click on the “toggle” link next to the text “This check is currently active”. To re-enable, click the toggle again.

The second way to disable a single check is within the check edit screen. Click on the “Edit” button to call up the check edit modal and remove the checkbox from the “Enable Check:” field, then click on “Save”. To re-enable the check, edit it again and check that same box.

Sometimes you may need to disable all the checks to a particular datacenter or for a particular server or service. You can do it one at a time as described above but that can be a click-fest if you have a large number of checks to disable. Our new features allow you to easily disable all of your checks at once, or to disable a group of them based on some powerful filtering capability (described more below).

Disabling All Checks
You can disable and re-enable all your checks with just a couple of clicks. In the “Account Settings” – “General Settings” tab, you’ll see a link for “Disable All Checks”. Click on it and all your currently enabled checks will be immediately disabled. To re-enable the checks, click on the new link that appeared that says “Re-enable Checks”. Please note that this will only re-enable checks that have been disabled using the “Disable All Checks” link. If you disabled a check using one of the methods described above in the “Disabling a Single Check” section of this post, the check will remain disabled.

Disabling all checks can be useful to silence monitoring and notifications during major outages, planned maintenance, or to quiet logs when troubleshooting.

Disabling Multiple Checks
Our new disable feature has some powerful filtering that can help you disable all checks where the label, type, and/or target are similar. Clicking on the “Show optional filters” link in the “Account Settings” – “General Settings” tab will display the available filter fields of “Type”, “Label”, and “Target”. After choosing the dropdown or typing your desired filters in the fields there, you need to click on the “Disable All Checks” link and NodePing will disable all currently enabled checks that match your filters.

If you’d like to disable all your HTTP Content checks, you can choose it from the “Type” drop down.

If all the checks you need to disable are named similarly (example: “Server1: website A”, “Server1: website B”, “Server1: website C”), you can disable all of them by putting “Server1” in the “Label” field. The matching works on any part of the label.

If a particular server is failing, you can disable all checks (no matter what type or label) that point to that server by putting the name or IP address used in the check “Target” field. For example, I can disable all checks that point to all nodeping.com hosts by typing “nodeping.com” in that field. It will disable checks to ‘smtp.nodeping.com’ and ‘www.nodeping.com’, no matter what the check type is.

The filters are additive so if you choose the “HTTP” type and type something in the “Label” field, only HTTP checks that match that label will be disabled.

Use the “Re-enable Checks” link to re-enable checks that were previously disabled using the “Disable All Checks” link and filters.

These filters have superpowers too, thanks to regex. You can geek out and provide a valid javascript regex expression for each filter in our UI or API. Run a curl one-liner to our API before your maintenance fires off to disable some checks and then re-enable them when it’s done. See our API reference for details.

NodePing is committed to bring you more functionality like these new disable check features available in all accounts now. If you don’t yet have a NodePing server monitoring account, we encourage you to sign up for a free, 15-day trial and see how our fast, accurate uptime monitoring can help you keep your services up and available.