Uptime Monitoring (NodePing)

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Applicable Plans - Virtual Cloud Servers, Virtual Machines, and Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments

Using the Uptime Monitoring (NodePing) Service

Overview

Uptime Monitoring allows you to set up monitoring checks for any port or URL of your eApps server, or any server anywhere, from multiple remote locations. Alerts can be configured to notify individuals or groups, that you define, whenever a remote check fails. This service works for all Virtual Cloud Servers, Virtual Machines, and Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments.

Monitors can be configured with our First Responder managed services add-on. With this option, alerts will be sent to eApps Support. This option ensures that highly skilled technicians are standing by 24 hours a day, and will take action within minutes if your site fails to respond to a remote monitor. NOTE: First Responder is only available for eApps Hosted servers.

The Uptime Monitoring Service is accessed from the Customer Portal - https://portal.eapps.com. Log in to the Customer Portal, and go to My Cloud > Uptime Monitoring. This is where you will create and manage your checks.

Creating Monitors for Your Server
    Creating Contacts and Contact Groups
    Creating Monitors

Creating Monitoring Checks for Your Server

In order to create monitors for your server, you will need to do the following:

  1. Create Contacts
  2. Create Contact Groups (optional)
  3. Create Monitoring Checks

Creating Contacts

A Contact is an e-mail address that alerts from the monitoring service will be sent to. A Contact can also be added to a Contact Group (covered below). Contacts must be created before any Contact Groups.

Adding a Contact

  1. From the Server and Website Monitoring section of the main Uptime Monitoring page, click on Contacts.
  2. Select the time zone you want the alerts to use
  3. Click Add New Contact in the Contacts section
  4. Type the name of the contact and select the contact method: email, SMS, or Slack.
Available Contact Methods
  • Email - email address where alerts will be sent. You cannot enter an @eapps.com e-mail address as a Contact. If you want eApps to monitor your Virtual Server, please select the First Responder option.
  • SMS - the phone number where alerts will be sent to. This needs to be in the international format including the country code. For example, if your country code is 52 and your phone number is (551) 234-5678, you will need to input 525512345678
  • Slack - this requires the URL to your Slack webhook
You may also add additional contacts in this same screen by clicking Add another. 

A Contact Group allows you to designate which contacts get notified in the event of a certain kind of alert from the monitoring service. For example, you could have a Contact Group called "Webmaster" that contains the contacts for your web development team who would get notified if there was a problem with the website, and a Contact Group called "System Admin" that contains the contacts for your system and network administrators team who would get notified if there was a problem with the Virtual Server or network. You can have any number of Contact Groups in your account, and Contact Groups can have any number of Contacts.

Creating Contact Groups

Adding a Contact Group

  1. From the Server and Website Monitoring section of the main Uptime Monitoring page, click on Contact Groups
  2. Click Add New Group
  3. Type the name of the Contact Group
  4. Select the Contacts that will be part of the Contact Group
  5. Click Add New Group

Creating Monitoring Checks

After adding Contacts and (optionally) Contact Groups, you can create a Monitoring Check.
  1. From the Server and Website Monitoring section of the main Uptime Monitoring page, click on Checks. 
  2. Click Add New Check
  3. Select the type of Check you would like to configure
You can add Monitoring Checks for your server using standard protocols. Here are the supported checks:
  • Audio Stream
  • DNS
  • FTP
  • HTTP
  • HTTP Advanced
  • HTTP Content
  • HTTP Parse
  • IMAP4
  • MySQL
  • NTP
  • Ping
  • POP3
  • Port
  • Push
  • RBL
  • RDP
  • SIP
  • SMTP
  • SNMP
  • SSH
  • SSL
  • Websocket
  • WHOIS
Each Monitoring Check has different mandatory fields. The most common ones are:

Check Label - a label to identify the check. This is what will appear when viewing Monitoring Checks in your customer portal.
Enable Check - enable or disable the Monitoring Check
Region - where you want to check your service from. For example, if your server is in North America but you have several customers in Asia, it may be a good idea to configure the region as Asia. This way you will be alerted when that region is unable to reach your server.
Check Frequency - how often the service should be checked. If this is a critical application we recommend checking every minute. For less critical components, you may set up less frequent checks.
URL - The URL that you want to monitor
Timeout - how long to wait before the check is considered a failure
Sensitivity - how soon you want the Monitoring Check to try again after a failure.
Dependency - it is common to have a server hosting multiple services and applications. When you set up a Monitoring Check as a dependency of another, you will only get an alert for the parent Monitoring Check. This means if you have set up a ping check as a dependency of two other checks (MySQL, HTTP) and the server goes down, you will only get an alert for the ping check failing instead of all three failing
Notify - The Groups and/or Contacts you want to receive the Alerts
Delay - Polling interval for the monitor
Schedule - Time period for receiving alerts that you assign to a Contact or Group. The schedule defaults are as follows:
  • Weekends - Sat thru Sun
  • Weekdays - Mon thru Fri
  • Days - 6 AM to 6 PM (Mon thru Sun)
  • Nights - 6 PM to 6 AM (Mon thru Sun)
Note: If you want to change the days and or times for these schedule periods contact billing@eapps.com

Custom Monitoring Checks

If you need a Monitoring Check that is not supported, our technicians can create a custom one for a fee. Contact sales@eapps.com for more information.

Reports

You can view a history of alerts for a given check as well as uptime reports for each check you have configured.

Uptime

The uptime report will display graphs to track your server's uptime over time.
  1. From the Server and Website Monitoring section of the main Uptime Monitoring page, click on Checks. 
  2. Find the Check you want to view and click on Reports
  3. You can change the report view by Monthly Uptime or Daily Uptime

History

The history will show you the results of every single check done on the server. You can use this together with the uptime graphs to track when your service goes down and for how long.
  1. From the Server and Website Monitoring section of the main Uptime Monitoring page, click on Checks. 
  2. Find the Check you want to view and click on History
  3. You can change the report view by hours (6, 12) or days (1, 2, 3, 7, 30). 

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