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 , ,

Leveraging NodePing’s Web Monitoring for Optimal Website Uptime

2023/08/15 by Leave a comment

Hello, NodePing community and all those striving for flawless website uptime!

In this digital age, achieving uninterrupted website availability is paramount. At NodePing, we provide the tools you need to ensure your website doesn’t just exist—it thrives. This blog post will dive into our range of HTTP-oriented server monitoring checks and how they can address real-world tech business needs.

1. HTTP Check: Your Go-To for Website Availability Monitoring

Our HTTP Check provides a reliable pulse on your website’s status. It connects to your site at regular intervals, confirming that it’s up and responding with a 200 status code within the defined timeframe.

Use case: Online retailers understand the importance of 24/7 website availability. With our HTTP Check, you get an early warning of any potential outages, allowing you to promptly address issues and maintain a seamless shopping experience for your customers.

2. HTTP Content Check: More than Just a Pulse

Our HTTP Content Check takes things a step further by examining the actual content of your site’s response. In addition to checking if your site is up, this check looks for specific content within the response, based on a string or regular expression you provide. It can also make a negative match, making sure that a specific string or regular expression match does not exist on the page. This is great for looking for database errors appearing on the page, for example.

Use case: If you are monitoring a WordPress or other CMS site, you may need to verify that the site is showing specific content on the page, and not just responding with a “No Posts” message.

3. HTTP Advanced Check: Comprehensive Website Monitoring

The HTTP Advanced Check allows for full customization of your website monitoring needs. It’s the perfect tool for comprehensive server monitoring, from request methods and response headers to posted fields and data.

Use case: Tech start-ups with complex SaaS products can benefit from the HTTP Advanced Check. This tool can ensure all components of your site, including complex forms or API endpoints, are functioning as intended.

Leveraging the Suite of Monitoring Tools

One of the big strengths of Nodeping’s monitoring services is how they can all work together to make sure all the pieces are working. NodePing’s checks are designed to work in harmony. If you’re responsible for a web site, it is important to know if the DNS is working properly as well. You might also want to monitor the health and expiration date of your SSL certificates on your sites. And you can use our automated diagnostics to put information about why services are failing their checks directly in your inbox. For example, this can include an MTR to help diagnose when your web host is having connectivity problems. A layered approach provides the most comprehensive picture of your website’s health.

At NodePing, we understand that every website is different, and that’s why we’ve designed a range of checks to meet all kinds of needs. From small blogs to complex e-commerce platforms, our checks can help you ensure your site stays up and running.

So why wait? Dive into our documentation, explore our checks, and make sure your website’s heartbeat is as steady as ever. We also have a free trial 15 day trial. And remember, we’re here to help. If you have any questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Filed under HTTP Tagged with , ,

Follow redirects for HTTP checks

2014/12/08 by Leave a comment

We’re happy to announce a new optional feature for our HTTP checks – follow redirects.

Until today, NodePing website monitoring only supported the single HTTP request/response.  An often requested feature was the ability to follow HTTP redirect codes in the 300s and evaluate the check on the final page of the redirects.

redirect

We believe you should monitor everything, including your redirect pages. We recommend you create a separate check for the redirect and ensure the 301 or 302 status code and the header ‘Location’ is to the destination URL you expect and then create another check to monitor that destination URL. We still think this is a best practice for website monitoring and will help you pinpoint a failure more quickly should something happen to your redirect or destination URL.

We realize there’s a use case for monitoring HTTP responses that includes following redirects and we’re happy to include that option in our HTTP checks. The default behavior remains the same – that is we do not follow redirects but rather evaluate an HTTP status code in the 300 range as a successful response.

To activate this option in your HTTP check, set the “Redirects:” drop down to “Follow redirects” or, if you’re using the API, set a ‘follow’ parameter to true. Our probes will follow up to 4 redirects and per the RFC, will only redirect on HTTP GET requests.

For more information, please see our documentation on the supported HTTP checks:
HTTP – Simple website monitoring for 200-399 HTTP status codes
HTTP Content – Verify content exists (or doesn’t exist) in the returned HTML
HTTP Advanced – The swiss-army-knife of HTTP checks. Set request headers, verify response headers, send JSON, XML, or form data, use GET/POST/PUT/HEAD/DELETE/TRACE/CONNECT methods, verify content, and expected returned HTTP status codes. You can even monitor a 404 page.

 

Filed under Announcement, NodePing Updates Tagged with , , ,

HTTP Advanced Check

2013/07/24 by Leave a comment

Our HTTP checks for website monitoring at NodePing already include our standard HTTP Check, the HTTP Content Check that lets you verify that specific content is present or is not present in the page, and the HTTP Parse Check that allows you to track and alert on arbitrary data points in the response. Today we’re excited to announce that we’re adding the HTTP Advanced Check to our HTTP line up.

The new HTTP Advanced Check adds the following capabilities:

  • simulate a form POST to your web site and verify the expected response
  • check for arbitrary HTTP response status codes for custom API servers
  • send HTTP headers
  • verify specific HTTP headers are being received
  • send PUT, DELETE, HEAD, TRACE, or CONNECT methods

This will allow you to do more in-depth monitoring of your HTTP services. Use cases may include:

  • POST incorrect credentials to log in pages and verify the HTTP status code of 403 is returned.
  • Send mobile browser User-Agent headers and use the content checking to verify the mobile version of your site is being shown
  • Verify a PDF link is returning a PDF file by checking the return header for the correct ‘Content-Type’:’application/pdf’
  • Verify your redirect script is returning a 302 status code and not an error.

Additional information about this new check type can be found in our documentation.

The HTTP Advanced check is now available on all NodePing accounts. All accounts also include unlimited notifications, including international SMS. If you don’t have a NodePing account yet, please sign up for our free 15-day free trial.

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