The following informatiion provides basic instructions on adding proactive monitoring and alerting for remote web sites (sites external to the City of Lee's SUmmit network).
ITS has a monitoring service available via www.monitis.com
The primary account is setup under the GIS Manager email address - bryan.hall at cityofls.net
The password is in the master database and is also known by Bryan Hall, Nathan Smith and Randy Dickey.
The monitis services provides monitoring based upon teh number of sites, frequency of monitoring/pinging, types of monitoring and methods of alerts.
As of 06/01/2010 - The city has an annual purchase plan for 8 external web sites to be monitored. Most alerts are sent via email, which does not have an additional fee included. Some alerts may be sent via text message or a voice phone call of the alert - which has an additional charge. ITS has 30 of these message types available per month. THe utilization should be monitored and this number can be decreased/increased based upon need.
Another procedure defines the expectations of the staff who get alerts from the system. The purpose of this procedure is to define how to add a site to be monitored to the service.
1. If needed, obtain approval to purchase a new monitor license for the site (if none are available).
2. Login to the side and select 'add monitor'.
3. Select 'External Monitor'.
3. Enter the required information about the site including the site url and the protocol. Normally the protocol will be http or https, but other types of web services can be monitored.
4. In necessary and appropriate for the type of site being monitored, you can also elect to monitor a piece of content on the site itself. This is useful if there is a risk of the site appearing to be running (responding to a ping) but the site still be corrupted, perhaps due to software failure or because of an attack. To use this feature, select the GET field and enable the 'content monitoring' option. you will then need to enter the content the service should watch for on the web site. NOTE: The content monitor is case sensative.
5. The next screen is a summary of the new site to be monitored. The name should be changed from the URL to a helpful name. This name is sent when an alert is generated, so select a name which will help the person recieving the alert to understand which site is causing an issue.
ITS has a monitoring service available via www.monitis.com
The primary account is setup under the GIS Manager email address - bryan.hall at cityofls.net
The password is in the master database and is also known by Bryan Hall, Nathan Smith and Randy Dickey.
The monitis services provides monitoring based upon teh number of sites, frequency of monitoring/pinging, types of monitoring and methods of alerts.
As of 06/01/2010 - The city has an annual purchase plan for 8 external web sites to be monitored. Most alerts are sent via email, which does not have an additional fee included. Some alerts may be sent via text message or a voice phone call of the alert - which has an additional charge. ITS has 30 of these message types available per month. THe utilization should be monitored and this number can be decreased/increased based upon need.
Another procedure defines the expectations of the staff who get alerts from the system. The purpose of this procedure is to define how to add a site to be monitored to the service.
1. If needed, obtain approval to purchase a new monitor license for the site (if none are available).
2. Login to the side and select 'add monitor'.
3. Select 'External Monitor'.
3. Enter the required information about the site including the site url and the protocol. Normally the protocol will be http or https, but other types of web services can be monitored.
4. In necessary and appropriate for the type of site being monitored, you can also elect to monitor a piece of content on the site itself. This is useful if there is a risk of the site appearing to be running (responding to a ping) but the site still be corrupted, perhaps due to software failure or because of an attack. To use this feature, select the GET field and enable the 'content monitoring' option. you will then need to enter the content the service should watch for on the web site. NOTE: The content monitor is case sensative.
5. The next screen is a summary of the new site to be monitored. The name should be changed from the URL to a helpful name. This name is sent when an alert is generated, so select a name which will help the person recieving the alert to understand which site is causing an issue.
6. The next step is to identify the service locations to monitor from and the monitoring frequency.
7.The service locations allow the web site/page to be checked from more than one location. This is helpful in case one area of the country or a particular ISP is having an internet issue and it causes the site to be unavailable. By selecting more than one location, the system can verify that the site is truly the source of the issue because it will determine if one or all locations are down. Alerts can be set (default) to only be sent when all locatoins are reporting a site as being down. This should be set to monitor from US West and US East.
8. The frequency can be from 1 minute checks and up. For all of our sites, the current standard is to check them every 5 minutes.
9. Timeout indicates how long the ping should wiat for a reply. The default is 10 seconds, which is fine. The purpose of ITS monitoring is currently to identify sites which are not working, not sites which are slow. THis data IS captured for each ping and a report can be run to see the response time of the site to the monitoring services. If this time out is exceeded, it will log as a failed ping.
8. The frequency can be from 1 minute checks and up. For all of our sites, the current standard is to check them every 5 minutes.
9. Timeout indicates how long the ping should wiat for a reply. The default is 10 seconds, which is fine. The purpose of ITS monitoring is currently to identify sites which are not working, not sites which are slow. THis data IS captured for each ping and a report can be run to see the response time of the site to the monitoring services. If this time out is exceeded, it will log as a failed ping.
10. The last step is to select who is to be notified and when. This informatino should have already been determined based upon the SLA of the site and the requirements must be added to the CityWebSite -MonitorMatrix.xls worksheet. A current PDF copy of this worksheet should be kept on the lsits.net documentation site and is attached to the Web Site Monitoring Procedure.
11. To add an alert for the new site, you select the person/address/phone number to be alerted. You then enter the time frames the alerts are to be sent. Note that the site is monitored 24x7 regardless of when alerts are sent. You can use a different option to place a site into maintenance mode or enter a fixed maintenance period, then the site will not be monitored during that time.
12. After selecting the individual who will get an alert, you select the time frame. You can choose between Always, At select times (every day of the week) or on a specific range of days and times (monday through friday from 8 to 5).
13. When entering specific times for alerts, it is very important that the time be entered as GMT, which is 5 hours ahead of Central time. So if you want an alert to start at 6 am, this value should be set to 11 GMT.
14. The next important value is to indicate after how many failures you want an alert to be set. IF this value is 1, and the monitoring of the site was setup for every 5 minutes, an alert will be sent the first time the site is not seen when it is checked every 5 minutes. If this value is set to 4, the alert would not go out until the site was down at least 20 consecutive minutes. Again, refer to the Web Site MonitorMatrix which should identify the standard for the type of site and the person getting the alert.
11. To add an alert for the new site, you select the person/address/phone number to be alerted. You then enter the time frames the alerts are to be sent. Note that the site is monitored 24x7 regardless of when alerts are sent. You can use a different option to place a site into maintenance mode or enter a fixed maintenance period, then the site will not be monitored during that time.
12. After selecting the individual who will get an alert, you select the time frame. You can choose between Always, At select times (every day of the week) or on a specific range of days and times (monday through friday from 8 to 5).
13. When entering specific times for alerts, it is very important that the time be entered as GMT, which is 5 hours ahead of Central time. So if you want an alert to start at 6 am, this value should be set to 11 GMT.
14. The next important value is to indicate after how many failures you want an alert to be set. IF this value is 1, and the monitoring of the site was setup for every 5 minutes, an alert will be sent the first time the site is not seen when it is checked every 5 minutes. If this value is set to 4, the alert would not go out until the site was down at least 20 consecutive minutes. Again, refer to the Web Site MonitorMatrix which should identify the standard for the type of site and the person getting the alert.