User Documentation

Why use any uptime monitoring service?

Uptime Monitoring Services also known as Synthetic Monitoring help provide a way to find out the status of your API or website from various geographic regions and data centers.

• You can monitor uptime of public URLs which serve either HTTP or HTTPS protocol on any port.
• You can keep your users and teams notified of any planned and unplanned service disruptions
• You can showcase history of uptime to make your business stand out from your competition

Who is a potential user of an uptime monitoring service?

• E-commerce store Owners
• Marketing Website Owners
• Bloggers
• Documentation Websites
• Android and iOS backends
• API Providers
• ERP Portals
• Code Hosting Service Owners
• Tech and Marketing Teams

Why should I use an uptime monitoring service?

It is important to know that an issue happened than not even knowing that it happened. There are many reasons websites go down, some of which are in your control and some of which are not in your control.

Though system administrators and IT administrators spend days or even months setting up the perfect solution to ensure websites stay up, websites go down all the time. Here are a few common examples where we have seen customers go to an alternate website

• Server goes down
• Configuration changes
• Bandwidth exceeded on your DreamHost hosting
• Configuration changes you made on CloudFlare or your hosting provider
• HTTPS certificate expired
• Spikes in traffic to your server. Ex: HN hug of death
• Outage from your service provider
• Power Outage (someone tripping over a power cord was a common thing around 2010s)
• Changes to your DNS(Domain Name Service)

Amazon.com went down in 2013 and it was estimated to lose around $66k revenue per minute

Monitoring a Website

Web Page Monitor > New
Enter the details to create a new monitor

• URL to monitor — https://aws.amazon.com/
• Name — Website or Acme API
• Description — used by awesome startups

URL Examples

• HTTP and HTTPs websites — Example: https://example.com/
• Custom Ports — Example: http://example.com:8080/login.jsp
• By IP address — Example: https://1.1.1.1/ or http://93.184.216.34/index.html

Taking a Planned Downtime

Whenever you have a scheduled maintenance or expecting a downtime like deploying a new version of a website,
Check - Under Scheduled Maintenance?.

Pause checks for a Monitor

In case you decide want to temporarily pause monitoring, but maintain historical details of uptime,
Uncheck - Enable Monitoring

Removing a Monitor

Visit Web Page Monitor > Modify. Find Remove Monitor In case you decide you no longer need the monitor. You can use 'Remove Monitor'

Adding Integrations

You can add integrations to notify you or your team. See Integrations for more detail.

• PagerDuty - Alerting System
• Email - The oldest and reliable service
• Push Notifications - via Push Over
• Slack - Where everyone is online
• Webhooks - Generic HTTP or HTTPs endpoint

Details for nerds

• We support HTTP/1.0, HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0
• We support TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 for HTTPS
• If your DNS resolves to more than 1 IP address, we pick one of them and make the request
• We resolve IP addresses via IPv4 for now through Public DNS servers
• Notifications are sent through channels like PagerDuty, Slack, Email, Mobile Push Notifications or Webhooks

Advanced Configurations

• Setup individual monitors for each of load balancers (Nginx/HAProxy), Databases (MySQL/Postgres), Cache DBs (Redis/Memcache) and App instances
• Maintain separate monitors for each cluster deployed. For Example: Europe vs US vs Singapore Endpoints
• If you are using an external load balancer like CloudFlare, consider a direct permalink to your instances to bypass caching and other optimizations

Create a Status Page

Status Page > New
Enter the details to create a status page

• Name — Company Name or Acme
• Description — Acme's Public Status Page
• Status Page URL — /internal or leave as blank

Previewing a Status Page

Status Page > Preview

Enable Notifications

You need to enable notifications if you want to get notified of downtime

Email Notification

Provide an email address to get notified. We will send you an email from our monitoring system to you.

PagerDuty Integration

PagerDuty is one of the most widely used incident management systems used by oncall teams and hobbyists. You need to provide the 32 character integration key(routing key) in order to get notified of incidents of downtime and recovery.

Setting up PagerDuty Integration

1. Access your PagerDuty portal
2. Find your Service from Services > Service Directory

   

3. Select Integrations Tab
4. Click on Add a new integration to this service.
   1. Enter the Integration Name as Uptime Alerts or DomainList Alerts
   2. Select the Integration Type as Use our API directly and select Events API v2

   

5. Copy Integration Key

   

6. Add integration key into the application

   

Android and iOS Push Notifications via PushOver

Pushover allows you to receive messages as Push Notifications. This is very widely used by developers and teams who want minimal integrations and avoid "App overload" on their mobiles. See the website for pricing details. You can receive over 7,500 messages free per month.

Setting up PushOver Integration

We have integrated PushOver as a BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys) format. In order to allow us to push notifications,

1. Login to Pushover
2. Create a New Application

   

3. Take a note of the Application Key generated

   

4. Take a note of the User Key in the home page

   

5. Copy the above keys over from the previous steps to configure in DomainList.co, fill in the Application Key and User Key

   

Slack Webhook Notification

Most startups stay on Slack for real-time communication. You can receive notifications on Slack about uptime and downtime. We use webhooks to send notifications as opposed to a 2-way communication bot for reasons of privacy and security. We only post to the configured channel in the webhook.

Setting up Slack Incoming Webhooks

1. Visit Slack - Incoming Webhooks
2. Click on Add to Slack
3. Select the channel and click on Add Incoming Webhook Integration

   

4. Scroll down and update the name to DomainList so that it is easier to refer back.
5. Copy the generated webhook URL in the settings.

   

6. Paste the webhook URL copied in the previous step into DomainList.co app

   

Discord Webhooks

Open Source projects started to build their communities on Discord along side gamers for which Discord was originally built for. We use Discord Webhooks to send notifications as opposed to a 2-way communication bot for reasons of privacy and security.

Setting up Discord Webhook Integration

1. Open Discord App
2. Click on Server/Guild Name. Select Server Settings
3. Select Integrations. Select View Webhooks

   

4. Create a New Webhook. This creates a Spidey Bot below the existing webhooks
5. Update the Name to DomainList.co and the Channel Name. Click on Save Changes at the bottom of the screen
6. Click on Copy Webhook URL

   

7. Paste the webhook URL copied in the previous step into DomainList.co app

   

Zapier/Webhook Integration

A webhook is a mechanism to send/transfer information. Services like Github, CI servers and other tools send across events to communicate asynchronously with other services to trigger builds or notify about events.

If your service supports an incoming webhook, copy the webhook address (http or https endpoint) into the configuration. We will send POST request in JSON format at the provided URL in the settings.

When sending a request, we validate the SSL certificate for a https endpoint and message will not be sent if the certificate is either self-signed or expired.