There are some occasions when you may want to take your web site, web application or servers offline for some upgrade or maintenance purpose. To prevent your sites or applications from being monitored during the maintenance period, you should configure a maintenance schedule for your monitors and thus avoid unnecessary notifications from Site24x7.

Given below are step-by-step instructions on how to configure a maintenance schedule in Site24x7.

1. Log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to the Alerts tab.
2. Click Schedule Maintenance->Add Schedule link. The 'Add Schedule' screen will be displayed.
3. Provide details such as schedule name, description, recurrence details (i.e. daily, weekly or once), start time and end time in their respective fields.
4. The ‘Available Monitors’ box will display all the monitors present in your account. Select the required monitors and move it to the ‘Selected Monitors’ box.
5. Click the ‘Add’ button to complete the configuration.

For example, we have configured a maintenance schedule scheduled to run from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM on Sundays.

Add Schedule Screen

The schedule thus created can be viewed from the Alerts tab under Schedule Maintenace->Schedule Details section. You may edit or delete the schedule settings from this screen or re-use the settings of the schedule for a different set of websites.

You may leverage the utility of maintenance schedules and avoid unwanted notifications during a scheduled maintenance. This helps to ensure that you receive alerts only when there is a problem and not otherwise.

The Wimbledon Final yesterday, was an epic battle between two great Tennis players : Roger Federer Vs Andy Roddick.  The game was exhilarating to say the least. The scores : 5-7 7-6 7-6 3-6 16-14 Last game, 16 - 14 ! That makes it actually a 6 sets match. While watching the match, my mind was just trying to think what was going through the minds of the two players. Both had very powerful serves, both were superbly fit players, played great tennis with huge amount of concentration. However both made surprisingly unusual errors (an eg. mishitting the ball high up and ending with the ball going out). Federer was making it (unforced errors) too frequently all along until the 11th game of the last set. While Andy did it in the last game of the last set. It proved too costly for Andy though. He lost the game and with that the championship. That's how websites too could behave. Even if you have the most powerful servers, you still can have trouble with a few revenue critical web transactions which can affect your bottom-line. These transactions could work fine most of the time, but the few times it misbehaves could cost your dear. Why would these transactions fail ?

• Lots of users coming to your website during peak hours.
• New update made by your development team caused a transaction to fail under certain conditions. Eg: when selecting the option, "Book by ISBN number" the transaction failed.

These failed transactions could even have been high valued transactions. That is why you need to monitor your e-commerce transactions and take corrective actions immediately. Customers visit your website with an intention to make a decision and buy immediately. This means, your website should not only respond quickly but also support the other transactions consistently. With site24x7 Web Application Monitoring capability, you can make sure your e-commerce transactions work as expected. Lets take an example of an Online Book Store. John is a graduate student and looking to buy a book on Economics. He is trying to find the lowest prices offered on the web. John searches for different websites offering this. He tries to open up 5 to 10 sites that got listed in search results for the book he wants. Some of the sites did not load itself, he just closes those browser windows. Narrows down to a few good ones site A and site B.  Site A lists the book for $10 and in Site B its present for $9. He decides to buy from Site B. However Site B was broken when it comes to the step to make the payment when he used the "ISBN number" to buy the book. He goes to the Site A and tries to buy from there. He is successful and was happy it was real quick too. He did not regret paying that extra dollar. Site A won this customer !  Though this transaction is worth just $10, where do you think John will go the next time ? Trust is worth more than just the first transaction. With Site24x7 you can make sure your e-commerce transactions work as advertised. Know more about web application monitoring.

Author: Arun Here's a quick update. The system maintenance is complete and our servers are back online now. You will now be able to log into your Site24x7 accounts and monitor your web sites and web applications. As informed earlier, you will be unable to view performance historical metrics for the next couple of days due to data migration. However, uptime metrics will continue to be displayed as usual.

Author: Arun A quick update. We will be taking our servers offline today for a couple of hours for some urgent maintenance work. You will not be able to log into your Site24x7 accounts during this time period. Also note that your response time historical data will be temporarily unavailable for the next couple of days. This is due to some data migration work planned for these days. This data will be restored after the migration is complete. Your uptime stats will not be affected and will be available as usual. Only the performance metrics will be unavailable for 2 days. Sorry for the short notice and apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Author: Arun We recently introduced multi-location monitoring in Site24x7. Your websites and applications will now be checked from servers in 3 different locations. These checks will come in from California, Boston, and United Kingdom. The California location is our primary monitoring location and the other two are secondary locations.

The bulk of the monitoring will be done from the California location. When a website test from the California location fails, we recheck the site from UK and Boston locations before reporting it as down/up. We have plans to provide simultaneous monitoring from these locations soon. And we plan to add more locations to our network as well. Keep watching this space!

Author: Arun We came across couple of nice articles on Site24x7 recently. One is by Simon Dickson in "Managing your website" section of btbroadbandoffice blogs. His post is titled "Keep tabs on your website" and it gives a brief introduction about Site24x7 and our parent company Zoho. Some excerpts from Simon's article:

Zoho is a company making significant waves in the 'web 2.0' world: they specialise in online versions of common office programs, and rarely does a month go by without something new emerging from their labs. You name it, they've got it: word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, project management tool, CRM system, wiki platform, email server, and so on. Influential blog TechCrunch rates them as 'the best office suite on the web, bar none.'

Site24x7 couldn't be more straightforward: every so often, it hits your website to ensure it's still working OK, and logs the results. If it doesn't respond, or if it takes longer than you'd like, Site24x7 will send you an alert message via email, RSS feed or text message.

Read full article here. Site24x7 has also been listed in superdownloads.com.br website. Here is an excerpt:

Site24x7 é um serviço online de monitoração de sites que monitora a disponibilidade dos sites através do envio de requisições HTTP ou HTTPs em intervalos regulares de tempo, garantindo que estão online e operacionais. Além disso:

• Gera relatórios de performance, monitorando o tempo de resposta do site dentro de um período de tempo;
• Monitora aplicativos web, gravando e reproduzindo uma sequência de requisições HTTP para, por exemplo, monitorar a cesta de compras de um site;
• Através da checagem de presença ou ausência de palavras, monitora o site contra alterações não autorizadas realizadas por crackers. Seja notificado imediatamente se o conteúdo de seu site for alterado;
• Envia alertas por e-mail, SMS ou RSS se o seu site cair.

Full article can be read here. Thanks, all!

Author: Arun We, at Site24x7, periodically update our service with the intention of making things better for the user as well as providing more options. We are all set to come out with a new update this week. Here's a look into what's coming.

• Two new monitor types Mail Server Monitor - to help you monitor email server round trip time. Web Page Analyzer - to help you analyze each component of your web page to find out if they are slowing down your site performance.
• Schedule Maintenance - to help you deal with planned downtime.
• Import URLs - to help you add multiple website monitors at once.
• Schedule Daily/Weekly reports - to enable you receive reports at a time of your choice.

Apart from all the above features/enhancements, there is a cool new addition to the Reports section. Can you guess what it could be?

Author: Arun Here are some frequently asked questions about 'Trouble' Notifications sent from Site24x7's web site monitoring service, along with their answers. What do 'Trouble' notifications mean? Trouble notifications can mean any of the following: 1. Your site content has been modified. 2. The response time of your site has crossed some limits you have set. 3. Certain keywords are present/absent on your website. These notifications are sent only if you have configured content check, keyword check or response time check for your website monitor.

How do you differentiate a trouble email alert from a downtime alert? There are 2 ways to differentiate a trouble alert from a downtime alert. From the alert subject line: The subject line of a trouble alert reads different from that of a downtime alert. For a trouble alert, the email subject line will be in this format [your website] IN Trouble - [Site24x7] For a downtime/uptime alert, the format is [your website] DOWN - [Site24x7] From the alert content: For a trouble alert, the reason for the problem is mentioned. For a downtime alert, the reason for reporting downtime as well as the exact time when the site went down is also mentioned. How do I find out the exact cause of 'Trouble'? You can find this out from the email notification itself. Watch out for the 'Trouble because' field - it describes the reason behind the trouble.

In the above example image, I have configured Site24x7 to alert me if the keyword string "server error certificate" is  present on my web page. And this is reflected in the 'Trouble because' field. Believe this article was helpful in clearing some of your doubts about the 'Trouble' notification. For any further doubts or queries, contact our support team directly or reply as comments to this post.

Author: Arun Last week, when we had discussed the DNS Server Monitors feature, we had also mentioned about the DNS Lookup tool. Now here are some frequently asked queries about this tool along with their answers. What is DNS Lookup Tool?| DNS Lookup is a free online tool to look up DNS records for a domain. How do I get to the DNS Lookup tool? It can be accessed from two locations in Site24x7:

1. From the website - http://site24x7.com/dns-lookup.html
2. From inside your Site24x7 account. The tool can be accessed either from the Tools tab or from the right side panel.

How can I use the DNS Lookup tool? You can use this tool to find out the DNS host names and ip addresses for your domain. Just enter your domain name in the 'Enter Domain Name' field, select the record type from the list box, and click 'Lookup'.

In the above example, I entered zoho.com in the domain name field and selected 'ALL' record. The result shows ip address for zoho domain, along with the DNS host name and mail servers. Which DNS record types do you query? What do the record types stand for? DNS Lookup tool can query A, MX and NS records.

• An A record or address record maps a hostname to a 32-bit IPv4 address.
• An MX record or mail exchange record maps a domain name to a list of mail exchange servers for that domain.
• An NS record or name server record maps a domain name to a list of DNS servers authoritative for that domain. Delegations depend on NS records.

Do you have any other queries on the DNS Lookup tool? Reply through your comments here or contact our support team directly.

Author: Arun Recently, we answered some queries pertaining to Site24x7's pricing & upgrade policy here in the blog. Now here are a few more queries related to pricing/upgrade/payment process. I have Professional Account. Now I want to monitor more websites, how do I buy more website monitors? You can keep adding new website monitors using the 'Add Monitor' option. Our system will automatically check once every month to see if new monitors are added to your account, and adjust charges based on your actual usage. I have paid for 5 website monitors with 60 minute poll intervals. Now how can I change it to 5 minutes polling ? Will I lose any money? You need to just login to your account, edit the website monitors and change Monitoring Interval to 5 minutes. Our system automatically checks your account once every month and adjust charges based on your actual usage. You will not lose any money. Do you have any other queries on our pricing system? Reply through your comments here or contact our support team.