Features of Alertra Website Uptime Monitoring

Global Network.

We do uptime monitoring from locations around the world in the North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific regions. Our monitoring "nodes" are fully capable servers located in carrier-class data centers such as Equinix and Telehouse.

Synapse.

We check web servers several times a minute to make sure they're accepting socket connections. The impact on server and bandwidth is virtually undetectable. But if you lose your connection or run out of server resources, Synapse provides an unparalleled early detection mechanism. Honestly, we catch a very large percentage of outages this way and we catch them in seconds, regardless of the protocol monitoring interval you have selected.

See how it works

False Alerts: We don't do it.

We wait for consecutive failures from three different locations before we send an alert. Our monitoring nodes operate completely independently from each other, sharing no information. These design characteristics ensure that it's virtually impossible for us to send a false alert.

DNS Caching: We don't do it, either.

Most monitoring services simply rely on the DNS lookup facility of the underlying O/S. That means they won't recognize outages related to DNS until the TTL (time-to-live) expires, which could be hours or even days. We don't cache DNS lookups, we do a fresh lookup every time. That means we detect these outages as soon as they begin.

Protocols.

Most of our customers simply need us to monitor uptime of a website URL, but we also have native monitors for many other popular internet protocols (HTTP, DNS, SMTP, POP3, etc.). For obscure or custom services, we can monitor the socket itself using TCP.

See the full list

Custom Script.

When you need more than standard up/down monitoring, we can monitor your multi-step process (login, web transaction, end-to-end email, etc.) using a custom script.

ASL Documentation

Maintenance.

You can schedule maintenance in advance, or you can start/stop maintenance on demand. Either way, we don't monitor uptime or send alerts during maintenance.

More info

Detailed Response Time.

We break down the HTTP request/response so you can see each component: DNS lookup time, SSL handshake time (if present), socket connect time, time-to-first-byte (TTFB) and time-to-last-byte (TTLB). This is invaluable when you're trying to determine why your response time is slow. For example, a long TTFB means your server is taking too long to build the response page.

Packet Capture.

When you really need to dig deep, we provide the actual packet capture from every monitoring check we do. The packet capture can be downloaded and viewed using Wireshark, giving you the ultimate visibility into the interaction between our monitoring node and your server.