Alertra Is Raising the Bar on Website Monitoring Services

Here at Alertra, it is not uncommon for customers to ask us if there is any way that we can help them when we detect that their website has gone down. After being asked this question numerous times, we realized that it would make our customers lives much easier if we could change the DNS entry for their website during an outage so that it would point to the IP address of a backup server where the site would be live and functional. As a result, one of the webhooks we have recently developed for our customers now addresses the issue of fixing website downtime rather than just alerting customers of it.

What Does This New Webhook Do For You?

Our webhook feature is an event-driven tool that goes beyond knowing when your site is down. This tool allows you to do something about it seamlessly and as quickly as possible to ensure the available of your site to the public. Anytime an event is logged for a monitored device, Alertra can trigger a call to an external URL or any HTTP-based API, ensuring your visitors retain access to your site.

Let's say, for example, your primary web host goes down, causing your site to suffer an outage. Using webhooks, Alertra can call a URL at DNS Park in order to change the IP address of the URL to point to a backup web server until the outage has been resolved. Once your primary host goes back online, we make a similar call to change the DNS settings back to the original IP address. This ensures that your site isn't at the mercy of the uptime of your web host.

How to Get This Webhook to Work for You

If you want to add any of our new webhooks to your account, including the webhook that triggers an external call during a site outage, you'll need to contact our support department to have your webhooks configured. Since these powerful tools are still in their development, we do not yet have a public interface for the feature. Once we better understand how our customers will make use of our webhooks, we will develop an interface where you will be able to configure these tools on your own. In the meantime, our support staff will be more than happy to help you get webhooks set up on your account.

As you can see, Alertra is raising the bar when it comes to website monitoring services. We are taking the service beyond just a "monitoring" package that informs you the moment your site goes down and we are now implementing tools that help you do something about that downtime when it does occur. We look forward to our customers' feedback and responses to this new offering.