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 , ,

SMTP Monitoring with NodePing

2023/08/22 by Leave a comment

In the world of email communication, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) plays a crucial role in ensuring the seamless delivery of messages. However, like any other technology, SMTP is not immune to issues that can disrupt email flow and affect business operations. To maintain a healthy and reliable email infrastructure, it is essential to monitor SMTP servers continuously. In this blog post, we will explore how NodePing can be used to monitor for SMTP functionality, packet loss, blacklisting, deferred queues, and MX/SPF records.

NodePing is a versatile and powerful server monitoring service that allows businesses to monitor their infrastructure’s performance and uptime. With its extensive range of monitoring checks, NodePing provides an excellent solution for monitoring SMTP servers and ensuring they are operating optimally.

Monitoring SMTP Functionality

Verifying the functionality of your incoming SMTP server is crucial to ensure that it can receive emails without any hiccups. NodePing’s SMTP check allows you to periodically test your SMTP server by trying to send a test email to a designated email address. If the test email is accepted, it indicates that your SMTP server is functioning correctly. In case of failures, like timeouts or server errors, NodePing will promptly alert you, enabling you to troubleshoot and rectify the issues.

Monitoring Packet Loss

Packet loss can severely impact the performance of your SMTP server and lead to email delivery delays or failures. NodePing’s ICMP PING check is a valuable tool to monitor packet loss and routing issues to to your SMTP server. By regularly performing ping tests, you can assess packet loss trends and determine whether network-related issues are affecting your email delivery. If a failure is seen, NodePing automated diagnostics will send you MTR results so you can quickly troubleshoot where the issue originates. Addressing packet loss problems promptly will lead to a smoother email experience for your users.

Monitoring SMTP Blacklisting

Blacklisting can be detrimental to email delivery, as it prevents messages from reaching their intended recipients. NodePing’s RBL check allows you to monitor your SMTP server’s IP addresses against popular DNS-based blacklists (RBLs) such as Spamhaus and Barracuda. By configuring blacklisting checks at regular intervals, you can quickly identify if your server’s IP addresses have been blacklisted, enabling you to take immediate action to resolve the issue and maintain a good sender reputation.

Monitoring Deferred Queues

When your SMTP server is unable to deliver emails to the recipient’s mailbox immediately, it sits in the deferred queue. If emails in your deferred queues are piling up, you likely have a delivery issue. NodePing’s PUSH check can watch your deferred queues and send you notifications if they rise above what you’re comfortable with; allowing you to investigate and resolve the underlying problems before they escalate.

Monitoring MX Records

MX (Mail Exchange) DNS records play a crucial role in email delivery by specifying the mail servers responsible for receiving emails for a domain. NodePing’s DNS check allows you to monitor the MX records of your domain to ensure they are correctly configured and that your DNS servers are responding with those records properly. Regular checks of MX records help you keep incoming mail flowing.

Monitoring SPF Record

Your SPF record is actually a TXT DNS record that specifies which servers are allowed to send email from your domain. If that record is missing, compromised, or your DNS servers aren’t responding, sending email may be blocked or delayed. NodePing’s DNS check will make sure your SPF record is available and hasn’t been hacked. That will keep your outgoing mail flowing.

In conclusion, email monitoring is essential to ensure the reliability and efficiency of your message communications. NodePing provides a comprehensive suite of checks that empower you to monitor for blacklisting, SMTP functionality, packet loss, deferred queues, along with MX and SPF records. By leveraging NodePing’s monitoring capabilities, you can proactively identify and address issues affecting your SMTP server’s availability and performance, leading to better email deliverability and improved customer satisfaction.

Remember, a robust email infrastructure is the backbone of modern businesses, and investing in reliable monitoring tools like NodePing with automated diagnostics is a step towards a smoother and more efficient communication system.

Start monitoring your SMTP servers with NodePing today by signing up for our free, 15-day trial and stay one step ahead of any potential email delivery challenges!

Filed under DNS, Email, Monitoring, PING, SMTP, uptime Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

DNSSEC Monitoring

2019/10/18 by Leave a comment

Your DNSSEC implementation is an important part of increasing authentication for your DNS data. NodePing’s DNS check can now verify DNSSEC authenticated data.

To monitor DNSSEC, NodePing uses public key cryptography to verify the digital signature in the data all the way back to the root servers. If there’s an issue anywhere in the chain, you’ll be the first to know with NodePing’s fast and accurate notifications.

Designed to protect DNS clients from using forged or modified DNS data, DNSSEC ensures the information in the DNS reply is identical to what the owner of the DNS zone has digitally signed and published on their authoritative nameservers.

Only enable DNSSEC verification in your NodePing checks if your nameservers have that functionality.

If you do not yet have a NodePing account, please sign up for our free, 15-day trial. We’re confident you’ll find our uptime monitoring to not only be the fastest and most accurate, but also a great value.

Filed under Announcement, DNS Tagged with ,

Auditing IP Resolution with DNS Checks

2019/02/19 by Leave a comment

How would you know if your DNS account had been compromised?  If tampered with, an attacker could point your web and email traffic to their own controlled servers, enabling them to intercept potentially confidential information from you or your customers without your knowledge.

Emergency Directive 19-01

Recently, the US Department of Homeland Security issued its first ever Emergency Directive with a list of actions to mitigate DNS account tampering, an issue they report is on the raise.

The first recommended actions in their directive is to verify DNS resolution.

Action One: Audit DNS Records … audit public DNS records on all authoritative and secondary DNS servers to verify they resolve to the intended location.

In this post, I’ll show you how to continually monitor your DNS resolution using NodePing DNS checks to ensure your important domain names are resolving to the expected IP addresses. If anyone tamplers with your DNS records, you’ll quickly receive actionable notifications from NodePing.

Some of the record types you may want to verify with DNS checks are:

  • SOA – Start of Authority record
  • NS – Nameservers and the IPs they resolve to
  • Website FQDN
  • Website FQDN with www prefix (example: http://www.nodeping.com)
  • Email MX records and the IPs they resolve to
  • IMAP, POP, and SMTP FQDNs
  • FTP service FQDNs
  • All the above services for both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses

Setting up DNS monitoring

To create a new DNS check, click on the “Add new check” button in your NodePing account dashboard.

  1. Select DNS from the Check type drop down.
  2. Give it a friendly label to identify this check in lists and notifications.  Something like “Website resolver”
  3. Set how often you want the check to run on the Check Frequency field.  We recommend 1 minute intervals.
  4. Leave the DNS server field blank.  This will ensure that our probes will use whatever nameservers are listed on the domain.  If a hijacker accesses your DNS account , they’ll likely change the IPs of the nameservers so testing your own nameservers won’t be helpful for this type of monitoring.
  5. Enter the type of query you want to perform, and address you want the check to look up. Usually this should be a fully qualified domain name. It should not include “http://” or “https://”. Example : ‘nodeping.com’ or ’email.nodeping.com’ or ‘www.nodeping.com’
  6. Enter the information the check should look for in the DNS resolution response to verify the query has not been tampered with. What you put in this field will depend on the query type. For example, for A records, this will be your IPv4 address. For other types, such as MX or NS records, this is likely to be a fully qualified domain name. For AAAA records, the full notation is required. Example: IPv6 address 2606:c700:4020:11::53:4a3b requires the ‘missing’ zero sections – 2606:c700:4020:11:0:0:53:4a3b – there should be 8 sections total.
  7. Set a time out. The default 5 seconds works fine for most situations.
  8. Set the Sensitivity. High is usually appropriate.
  9. Set the notifications for this check. More information about notifications.

If your services are offered on both IPv4 and IPv6, you’ll need to create a separate check for each with the appropriate query type set to ‘A’ for IPv4 and ‘AAAA’ for IPv6.

Setting up one DNS check for every critical server and service will give you the peace of mind that your DNS hasn’t been tampered with and your customers are interacting with you, not some DNS hijacker.

Got questions or need help setting up DNS resolution audit checks?  Contact us; we’re happy to help.

If you don’t yet have a NodePing account, please sign up for our free, 15-day trial and sleep well knowing we’re keeping an eye on your DNS resolution.

Filed under DNS, Monitoring, Using NodePing Tagged with ,

DNS Monitoring for Both Sides

2011/11/11 by 4 Comments

DNS monitoring, like a coin, has two sides: “What does my DNS server say?” and “What does ‘public’ DNS say?”  With NodePing server monitoring, you can ask both questions.

Our DNS check allows you to send a query of a specific type to your DNS server (or a public DNS server) and test the response against a string you define.  For example, you can verify that your website domain resolves to your web server’s static IP address and have NodePing send you an email or SMS alert when either the server or the response fails.

DNS queries can be made for the following types and the response verified:

  • A
  • CNAME
  • MX
  • NS
  • PTR
  • SOA
  • TXT

You can find more info on the DNS checks and our other check types in our documentation.

If you don’t have a NodePing account yet, try out our new DNS monitoring checks for free with a 15-day trial.

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