Welcome to Alertra, Now What?
New Devices (Part 3 of 4)
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Your first device is probably a web server monitored using an HTTP-B device type. The HTTP-B check confirms that there is connectivity to your server and that your web service (e.g. Apache, IIS, Tomcat, etc..) is responding to requests. You can see a list of the devices you are monitoring, frequency, status, and cost at any time by clicking Devices in the Menu window on the left side of the page. You can go there now by clicking here.
To add a new device to your account, just click the "Add Device" button on the Devices page (be sure and select the type of device you want first; we support a wide range of network monitoring services).
HTTP/S Devices
The HTTP-B check is good at identifying connectivity issues, but if you use any sort of dynamic content generation such as PHP, ASP.NET, or Perl, you also want to be sure that the page generation is working correctly. This goes double if your dynamic content is populated by a database. To properly monitor a website with dynamic content, you should use an HTTP/S device. HTTP/S devices go beyond HTTP-B checks to load the entire content of the URL. With the entire content loaded, you can use the Verify Text option to check for specific text that should be on the page. By checking for the right text, you can help insure that the page is being generated properly.
Routers and other appliances...
You can use the PING and TCP device types to monitor the status of other Internet connected devices.
Scripts
For really in-depth monitoring our Script device type is unparalleled in functionality. A Script device can be used to navigate through web sites monitoring transactions from start to finish. Scripts aren't specific to HTTP/S though, a script can be written to interact with virtually any type of Internet connected service. One of the more popular uses for scripts is to monitor e-mail end-to-end by sending a message through SMTP and then watching for it to appear in the inbox using POP3.
You can find help on writing scripts here:
If you want help writing a script, just use the Contact Us page to send us the details of what you want your script to do. Unless it is overly complicated, we would be happy to help write your script free of charge. If the script is very complex, there may be a nominal fee to create the script.
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