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Monitoring

Automate the observation of your services and gain insights into the availability of your applications with our monitors. A monitor can be paused and restarted at any time.

Types of Monitors​

We offer different types of monitors to suit various use cases.

HTTP-Monitor​

Send HTTP requests to any domain, including your payload and authorization headers, to verify the functionality of your service through an external client.

http-monitor

Parameters​

  • Method: The HTTP method to use for this request.
  • Address: The URL of the service to send the request to.
  • Timeout: The number of seconds the monitor should wait to receive a response.
  • Valid Status Code: The response code that qualifies this request as successful.
  • Headers: Headers to include, such as Bearer Tokens, to authorize the monitor for the request.

Insights​

  • Certificate Expiration: The expiration date of your domain's certificate.
  • TTFB (Time to First Byte): The time taken to receive the first byte.
  • Connect: The time taken to initiate the connection.
  • Resolve: The time taken by DNS to look up the domain.
  • TLS Handshake: The time taken to complete the TLS handshake.
  • Transfer: The time taken to transfer the complete payload.

You can view these metrics for the last 20 probes by hovering over the probe boxes.

http-monitor-probe-metrics

Ping-Monitor (ICMP)​

Check if a server is still available by sending ICMP-Request to the server and receive insights about the latency of your infrastructure.

icmp-monitor

Parameters​

  • Address: The IP or domain to ping.
  • Timeout: The number of seconds the monitor should wait to receive a response.

Insights​

  • Packet Loss: The number of packets dropped during the probe.
  • Min RTT (Round-Trip Time): The minimum latency for this probe.
  • Average RTT (Round-Trip Time): The average latency for the connection.
  • Max RTT (Round-Trip Time): The maximum latency for this probe.

These metrics can also be viewed for the last 20 probes by hovering over the probe boxes.

icmp-monitor-probe-metrics

Creating a Monitor​

To create a monitor, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to Monitors in the left sidebar.
  2. Click on Create Monitor.
  3. Configure your monitor as needed.
monitor-creation

The ICMP method will only need an address and timeout to be configured.

Important: Every monitor needs to correspond to a service. If you don't create a service first, monitor creation is also not possible!

Monitor Settings​

  • Service: Select the service that corresponds to the monitor. This is required to create alerts for the correct service.
  • Interval: Set the interval at which the monitor will be executed.
  • Retries: Specify how many times the monitor should retry if it fails before it is marked as failed.

Statistics​

To better understand the performance and availability of your services, we offer a variety of monitor statistics.

HTTP statistics​

  • Availability represents the time that customers can fully access the service.

  • Probe duration is the total time from request inititation to the last byte of response.

    → often used to understand the end-to-end performance of the monitored system

  • Resolve measures the time required for a DNS resolution.

    → indication for the DNS resolution performance

  • Connect is the time it takes to build a TCP connection after a DNS resolution.

    → indicates network latency and the server’s ability to accept connections

  • TLS Handshake defines the required time for the negotiation and establishment of a secure SSL/TLS client-server connection.

    → shows the overhead of setting up encryption

  • Time to first byte is the total time from request initiation to the first byte of response.

    → helps in assessing the server's responsiveness

  • Transfer marks the time it takes from the first byte of the response to receiving the full response.

    → measures the download speed of the content from the server after the connection has been established

ICMP statistics​

Since ICMP ist a much simpler monitor method, the data derived from a probe can be visualised in just two metrics:

  • Availability and

  • Average RTT measures the average time it takes for a data package to travel from a source (like a client or monitoring probe) to a destination server and back.

    → captures the delay in the network between sending a request and receiving a response

Percentiles and timespans​

For a further analysis of each of these metrics, p50, p90 and p99 can be used. They're statistical measures used to understand the distribution and reliability of data, especially in performance monitoring.

  • p50 (50th Percentile): Also known as the median, p50 indicates the middle value of a data set. For example, in response time data, P50 tells you the point at which 50% of requests are faster and 50% are slower. It represents an average experience for users.

  • p90 (90th Percentile): This value shows that 90% of requests are faster than this threshold, while the other 10% are slower. It focuses on the upper end of typical performance, indicating what most users experience in nearly all cases.

  • p99 (99th Percentile): In this case, 99% of requests are faster, and only the slowest 1% are slower. It’s useful for identifying outliers or worst-case scenarios, such as occasional high response times.

To get a better scope of your service's perfomance, every metric can be viewed for the last hour, day, week and month.