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Frequently Asked Questions About Our Technology
Will your monitoring services affect my web site's performance? The AlertMeFirst monitoring traffic adds the equivalent of one visitor to your online service every “x“ minutes, depending on the frequency you choose. Because Web and email servers are typically designed to handle hundreds and even thousands of simultaneous users, these regular visits from AlertMeFirst are insignificant compared to your regular site traffic. What type of pager do I need to receive alerts? AlertMeFirst can send alerts to alphanumeric pagers via phone and email, and to numeric pagers. If a phone number is required to send a page, the paging service you use must be in North America. The easy-to-use Subscription Wizard will walk you through setting up your pager to receive alerts. You also have the option of just receiving email alerts if you do not wish to receive pager alerts. Most digital cell phones (and some PDA devices like "Blackberries") now come with an Internet email address - a good method to receive alerts. For SMS services, your SMS carrier can most likely provide an email alias that would redirect our email alerts to you. Can you monitor services that are in private IP space behind a NAT router or firewall Many administrators use sophisticated security and special network address translation and reverse proxies to open up services into private IP space. Any service that your Internet user community can access on any Internet port is accessible by AlertMeFirst. Our custom service type can send custom queries and analyze the response for very specific text strings so you can detect whether or not an internal private IP based system is working.
For example: Can you monitor devices that do not have a public IP address? If the devices you need to monitor are not database or application servers, you may have another option open to you. If you can configure your router for "Port Address Translation" or PAT, you can assign a particular port number to each device you want to monitor (such as an internal router, gateway, firewall etc.). Your router will then translate that port number into a specific internal IP address. You can limit the access to these ports to only AlertMeFirst's IP addresses for additional security. If I have two Internet feeds from different ISPs, can you monitor both those links? If they are set up through some type of automatic sharing or balancing protocol such as BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), then we have no control over which link our probes will travel on. But if one feed is your primary, and the other is used only if the primary fails, then our monitoring will show the performance of whichever link is active at the time. If you set up two monitored devices; each with its own IP address, you will be able to identify the IP address of a device in the subnet range of each of the Internet feeds and directly monitor both of them simultaneously. My web site is having a problem but I did not get an alert! There could be a number of reasons for this but the most likely is that your Web server is still running and sending out some HTML code but not the default page you were expecting. You may be getting an error code displayed as an HTML page, which AlertMeFirst will regard as a functioning server. The only way to distinguish between a proper Web site page and one with an error code is to monitor it with the “custom” service type and have AlertMeFirst search for a “keyword” that would only be present if the Web server was properly serving up the default page. Please note that the word or phrase you specify must appear within the first 4K bytes of the page for the alert not to be triggered. How reliable is the AlertMeFirst system? Not only do we deploy several independent servers that generate the IPQs on the Internet (if one fails, the other automatically takes over) we also have connections to three different Internet access providers which automatically back each other up. In addition, we have the capability to provide monitoring from a variety of different geographic locations for even more backup (contact us for details). By combining these facilities with our surplus levels of power, multi-tier application architecture, top-of-the-line hardware and software, means the possibility of getting a false alert due to any problems at our end of the Internet is virtually impossible. I got an alert but my web site seems to be working fine! If you open up a browser and it appears that your Web site is fine, but you keep getting alerts, it could be that your DNS is down. Some pages of your Web site or the IP address of your site could be cached in your system, so you may not notice that there is a problem with your DNS server. AlertMeFirst and any new visitors to your site, however, will not have these pages or IP address cached so AlertMeFirst will deem your site to be inaccessible and send out an alert. Another possibility is that our IPQ never reached your Web site due to a problem or congestion somewhere else on the Internet (could be dropped at various locations including the ISP that feeds the Web host). While your Web site might be working fine from where you sit, it is good to be informed if an IPQ got dropped anywhere, as this may affect your customers as well. If you get too many of these types of alerts, you can adjust the alerting rules so you don’t receive alerts every single time an IPQ is dropped. |