Many Clicky users have asked us about site monitoring. We are happy that this is top-of-mind for some of you because its importance should not be understated. Often we will receive emails from Clicky users asking why there was a dramatic lag in visitors tracked or a complete drop-off altogether. While there can be many explanations, it is not uncommon that the site itself went down unbeknownst to the site owner. Standard web analytics will not be able to tell you this, but site uptime monitoring and alerts will.
With this in mind, we are excited to announce a closed beta in partnership with Monitage, a newly-developed site uptime monitoring service by Roxr Software (that’s us). We have integrated Monitage into Clicky to give you a bigger picture of the health and activity of your web sites.
Monitage monitors web sites from five locations around the world (three in the US, one in Paris, one in Japan) and only declares a downtime event if a majority of its servers agree on it. This prevents network hiccups on the monitoring end from sending false alarms.
Pro Plus users and above receive access to the Monitage closed beta. When we officially launch, you will have the ability to create up to 30 checks per site with intervals as fast as 1 minute, but during testing we want to keep resource usage within a reasonable range. So for the time being, we are limiting to 3 checks per site with a max interval of 5 minutes. We expect to officially launch within 4 weeks, at which point Monitage will also be available as a standalone service.
To access Monitage, go to your site dashboard and click the Uptime tab. You can create checks for HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, FTP, IMAP, IMAPS, and ICMP (ping). We’ve also created a dashboard module.
You can also access uptime stats from the API. Check the API docs and search for “uptime”. type=uptime will give you the current status of all of your checks for a site. type=uptime-list will give you a chronological list of all downtime events for your site for the date range requested.
Last, we added uptime stats as an option in email reports as well.
When Monitage officially launches, we will determine what intervals and types of tests will be included with Clicky Pro Plus plans and above.
We are asking that you test Monitage, and let us know your thoughts, what you like, don’t like, and want to see. As Monitage is in its infancy, we want your feedback to help mature it into a stalwart companion to Clicky.
Note to white label customers: Monitage will be added as an option to white label service when it officially launches, but for now it is only available to Clicky users.
Update, Feb 4: Just pushed an update that integrates uptime monitoring into the Big Screen report. Also added web hooks to the setup page. Enter a URL and we will POST a JSON object (documented in the setup page) to that URL for events.
Also we’ve been getting reports of false positives since launch, we are pushing some updates later today that should fix it entirely, or at least close to.
