The Official Blog of Site24x7 - Website Monitoring Service

Track availability and performance Now easily track the availability and performance of your websites from multiple locations across the globe. Identify performance issues faster and take corrective actions before it affects your customers.     Get instant alerts via Push Notification Receive instant alerts on your Android phone via push notification. All you have to do is register for push notification and receive instant alerts for any perfromance or downtime issue.     Analyze downtime via Root Cause Analysis Zero-in on what caused the downtime based on webpage screen shots, Traceroute, ping analysis and DNS analysis. Now get down to fix the problem right away. Key Upcoming Features Here are some of the interesting features we will be coming up with in the near future: Site24x7 iPhone App PagerDuty Integration Ability to configure individual alerts for various Disk partitions Ability to monitor services running within your Windows Server Option to customize and share website performance reports And a lot more... Follow us:             Access Archives

© 2012. Site24x7 is a trademark of ZOHO Corp. All other company and product names may be trademark of the respective companies with which they are associated.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is one of the recent significant releases from Site24x7.  In this post we will see how to interpret a RCA report and how to put RCA to optimal usage in identifying and addressing performance and network issues.

Root Cause Analysis; what makes it different?

RCA is different from a conventional downtime alert. Conventional downtime alerts contain details like start time of the instance and traceroute if available, which is sufficient for you to know what happened. However, the critical question as to why it happened still remains unanswered. You need to know what caused the issue to immediately get down to working on it.

Root Cause Analysis automatically generates a plethora of information to arrive at a definite conclusion as to what triggered a downtime. RCA intends to determine the root cause of specific downtime or performance issue. In short RCA aims to answer questions like what went wrong, how it went wrong and why it went wrong.

Interpret your RCA report.

We will take the example of a simple 'website not reachable' scenario and try to interpret what the report says.

A normal RCA report will comprise of the following details.

• Checks from Primary location and re-checks from Secondary location.
• Ping Analysis
• DNS Analysis
• Traceroute Analysis
• Conclusion

Monitor Details & Location Details: This section shows you the current status of your website when polled from the Primary and Secondary monitoring locations. This will have downtime ​details, duration and location wise reason for down.

First Check - First check is done from the Primary Location

1. Screenshot: This screenshot is the exact error returned when the monitoring stations tried to connect to your website. This kind of acts as a proof or evidence of what happened exactly when the site was tried to reach. In our example the site returned ‘Connection Timed Out’ error. 

2. Test: Ping Analysis

Status: Server Unreachable due to timeout in Hop 16 

Traceroute analysis can help you to identify any vulnerability in your network. In this case RCA gives the conclusion that timeout happened in Hop 16.

3. Test: Domain Analysis

Status: Domain resolved properly

This is a complete health check of your Name Servers and Email Servers. In the below example, domain resolved properly.

Re-Checks from Secondary location

The same set of tests will be conducted from a secondary location as well to confirm the downtime.

4. Conclusion

This is where the RCA report tells you the probable reason for the down instance based on the above results. The conclusion reached in this case is “Connection to the server got dropped in the Hop 16”. This is obviously something to do with the network. Armed with this conclusion, you can immediately get down fixing the issue. May be you need to contact the hosting provider. 

Have you already used RCA reports? We would love to hear how RCA was helpful in identifying and resolving your issues. Do let us know in comments.

We are adding a new load balancing server in the London location. The new server will go live on April 16, 2012 and will help us to handle the huge traffic from this location efficiently. The IP for the new server in London is 80.76.218.60.


We request you to white list the above IP if you have enabled monitoring from London location. For any clarifications contact us at support@site24x7.com.

We have added one more location to our ever growing global monitoring network. The newly added location is Copenhagen in Denmark. With this addition you can now monitor websites or servers from 41 locations across the globe.

Below is the IP address of the Copenhagen location for your reference.

Location	IP
Copenhagen-Denmark	77.66.111.162

If you plan to monitor your websites from this location, ensure that above IP address is white-listed.

For any clarifications, send an email to support@site24x7.com.

We have been informed by our ISP at Rotterdam that they are facing some technical difficulties in their data center. Hence they are changing the IP address of our monitoring server. We apologize for the short notice. The new IP details are given in the below table.

Location	Old IP	New IP
Rotterdam (Netherlands)	213.163.84.159 213.163.84.160 213.163.84.161 213.163.84.162	134.19.176.30 134.19.176.80 134.19.176.81 134.19.176.82

If you have enabled IP restriction in your server, make sure that you add the new IP address into the allowed list. This change is necessary to ensure that our monitoring request carries on smoothly without any hindrance. If you have any questions, do contact us at support@site24x7.com.

The IP address for our Chennai (India) location will change from March 12, 2012. The new IP details are given in the below table.

Location	Old IP	New IP
Chennai- India	121.244.182.93	27.251.30.94

We request all our customers to take note of this IP change and white-list the new IP address.

If you have any questions or clarifications, do contact us at support@site24x7.com.

When you run a small business or if you have branch offices having 10—25 servers/desktops, you need a reliable and cost effective solution to ensure server availability. Employing a 'dedicated team' or installing costly software that require another 'dedicated team' to handle that software are certainly not the 'cost-effective' solutions you are looking for. What you need is a simple and easy-to-deploy monitoring software that can keep track of your 'behind-the-scenes' infrastructure.

Server monitoring service from Site24x7 provides an agent-based monitoring solution that lets you track the availability and performance counters like CPU, disk and memory of your Windows servers/desktops. A simple and reliable solution, server monitoring is offered from a hosted platform, thus instantly relieving you from the maintenance and upgrade worries of costly installed software. Its a install once and forget about it kind of agent. It update Site24x7.com with the performance metrics and can update itself.

Sign-up, install & configure. Ready to go in 5 simple steps.

Unlike other installed monitoring software, you don’t require an 'expert team' to handle this service. Follow 5 simple steps and you are ready to manage your Windows servers/desktops.

• Sign-up for Site24x7 trial account. (if you not have one already)

• Add a new server monitor.

• Download and install the Windows Agent software in your Windows servers/desktops.

• Set the usage thresholds for critical server counters like CPU, memory and disk.

• Leave the rest to Site24x7.

How does the server monitor work?

The Windows Agent software uses WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) protocol to collect metrics related the counters CPU, memory and disk and pushes this data to the Site24x7 server. Alerts (SMS/Email/RSS/Twitter) will be sent immediately when your server/desktop is detected unavailable or crosses your set threshold limits. This enables you to take corrective actions should anything go wrong, before your end-users/business is affected.

There are proper mechanisms in place to check if the installed Windows agent is working properly in the machine. The agent heart-beat check is continuously done at the Site24x7 central server and notifications will be sent if data is not received from the agent after a particular time. Similarly, the agent will notify the central server in case of a proper shut down at the installed site. This allows you to verify if the Windows agent itself is working properly or not.

Historical data which is collected and shown using exhaustive reporting features gives you a detailed insight into the availability and performance of your server/desktop. This data can come handy while doing capacity planning or other related business decisions.
You can monitor your websites from a global point of present using Site24x7 and now even monitor the underlying Windows servers that serve it !

Evaluation users can try it without restrictions. Sign up / Sign in now. Existing customers too can try it for free. If you suspend the server monitoring within 10 days, you will not be billed for the trial monitors that you setup.

FAQs

1. Do I have to open up firewall ports to use server monitor?
      No. The agent listens through port 443 which is open by default. If at all the port 443 is not open in your machine, the same must be opened to facilitate server monitoring.

2. Do you need passwords of my machine?
      You need not share any passwords with Site24x7. However the person who installs the Windows Agent software needs to have administrator privileges to do so in a machine.

3. Can you monitor a process on my Windows machine?
      Our development team is currently working on monitoring process, services and network statistics in Windows machines. You can expect this enhancement to be released soon.

4. I am an existing customer. How can I try the Server monitoring?
      Existing customers can try the server monitoring by adding a "Server Monitor" as usual. You will not be billed if you delete the server monitors within 10 days. However if you need any clarifications, please get in touch with Site24x7 support.

Server monitor is the latest release from Site24x7. Read more about it under server monitor or Sign up Now for our 15 days free trial.

Have you tried it out already ? Let us know in comments.

Yes, you heard it right! We have now provided an easy way for you read our list of monitoring server's IP address. This list will have the latest IP addresses of all our monitoring servers. So, if you are monitoring your website from California or New York and you want to know which IP address to add to your white list, just visit the below webpage and use any one of the machine readable formats to add them to your firewall settings and ensure smooth and continuous monitoring. 

We are moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for our São Paulo (Brazil) monitoring location.
The IP address for our São Paulo location will change from February 13, 2012.

The new IP details are given in the below table.

Location	Old IP	New IP
São Paulo	200.170.83.170	177.71.177.249

If you have enabled IP restriction in your server, make sure that you white-list the new IP address. If you have any questions, do contact us at support@site24x7.com.

We have been informed by our ISP at Hong Kong that they are facing some technical difficulties in their data center. Hence as a result, they are changing the IP address of our monitoring server. We apologize for the short notice.

If you have enabled IP restriction in your server, make sure that you add the new IP address into the allowed list. This change is necessary to ensure that our monitoring request carries on smoothly without any hindrance. If you have any questions, do contact us at support@site24x7.com.