At Hostek, we understand that you have more important decisions and task to handle than to worry about your server (or services on the server) performance and stability. We have our 24/7/365 dedicated support team readily available to handle and resolve any alerts that occur on a server or service being monitored.
In this guide, we will be covering what is monitored by default, as well as what other options are available to allow our team to be alerted when things may go wrong.
Default monitoring
By default, a server is created with only a PING monitor, which is a type of command one computer or server can send to another to test connectivity.
This type of test is really only going to be useful if the server itself goes down, as the ping test would then fail. However, if service(s) on the server becomes unresponsive the ping test is still going to be successful which can lead to a prolonged pause in service availability.
It is recommended to reach out to our team to set up more advanced monitoring. There are several different monitoring options available, which we’ll cover in the sections below.
What other monitoring alternatives are available?
As mentioned there are several different types of monitoring that we can add, so that our expert team can be alerted that your server needs to be looked into. These include server resource monitors, URL request monitors, as well as service-level monitors. Many of our customers utilize all of the available monitor types to ensure any issues are met quickly.
Resource monitoring
Our monitoring software and keep track of your servers resource usage and be set to alert at different thresholds. For example, if your server has 8GB of RAM we can set the monitor to alert our team if 90% of RAM is utilized on the server so we can investigate to find what is causing the high resource usage in order to prevent service disruption when the RAM eventually becomes maxed out.
The resource monitoring includes monitoring the levels of RAM, CPU as well as disk space (including multiple drives). You can take advantage of this feature for $22.75/month.
The premium support add-on includes resource monitors as an added convenience.
URL request monitoring
One of the most popular for individual website monitoring is the URL request check. Essentially, our monitoring service will send an HTTP (or HTTPS if configured) request to the URL you provide and ensure the request comes back with a 200 status (meaning request successful), as well as check to ensure a search keyword found on the page comes back successful.
This monitor includes a single URL to monitor, so any additional URLs needing to be monitored would need its own monitoring add-on. You can take advantage of this feature for $10.00/month per monitor.
The premium support add-on includes 3 URL monitors as an added convenience.
Service level monitoring
Your websites may rely on services such as IIS, ColdFusion, Lucee, etc… which can all be prone to crashes if additional tuning is required. We have built our monitoring software to be able to perform service level checks, as well as grab in-depth heap (memory) debugging information for services such as ColdFusion.
This feature can be configured to restart a service automatically if it detects consecutive health check failures. In addition, it can be configured to automatically grab logs needed for our teams’ research of the issue and will also alert our team so that we can ensure the services start back up successfully, as well as to analyze the logs generated.
This feature can be essential to any business needing fast and accurate resolutions to any unforeseen issues. If interested in these features please submit a ticket to our team with information on what you’re looking to accomplish.
Are third-party monitors allowed?
We do not allow any third party monitors to directly send reports to our team. We have found that several third-party monitors have been unreliable with false positives or getting blocked by our network due to
’probing’.
It is not ideal for our team to spend time investigating false positive reports, so our monitoring team only handles alerts generated by our own monitoring software.
You can still utilize any third-party monitoring software you desire. However, the alerts would need to be sent directly to you, which you would then need to figure out if the alert is a false positive or not before contacting our team for assistance. It’s important to note that this method requires you to submit an issue with our team which can delay the resolution of the issue depending on how long it takes for you to report the issue.