monitored from three
geographically diverse locations

How ipPatrol® works - Overview

You choose 3 out of 5 monitoring locations plus a 4th failover location which will be activated automatically if any of our monitoring servers fail.

All three monitoring servers visit your server at the same time every monitoring interval and attempt to access the sevice you have requested to be monitored and wait for a response.

If your service responds correctly to our monitoring servers and the monitoring servers report the service as working (up).

The results including the dns lookup time, connect time, first byte time, transfer time and elapsed time are recorded.

If your service responds incorrectly or any of the other checks (dns lookup, ip address returned, content checks etc.) fail it is deemed to be down.

If your service does not respond within the timeout period specified it is also deemed to be down and diagnostic traces are performed on your server to help you diagnose the problem.

The monitoring results from each monitoring server together with any diagnostic traces produced are returned to our central data centre for processing.

As the results are received by our central data centre they are processed and any anomolies removed so that we do not issue false alerts.

Alerts are sent out via sms and email as required to the contacts you have configured by the control panel.

For the first hour whilst your service is down we switch to one minute monitoring. This helps us produce accurate availability statistics and means you quickly get alerted once the problem is solved.

If your service remains down additional alerts will be sent as per your configuration to remind your contacts that the service is not working.

Once the service is back up alerts will be sent to your contacts to inform them all is well.

The results are stored in our data archive and are available for at least 3 years.

Each day, week and month we use the data archive to send out email reports detailing availability and performance over the given period to the contacts you have configured in plain text or html format.

Reports include the availability of the service monitored over the period and a grapical analysis of the overall performance of your service and a detailed graph showing dns time, connect time, first byte time and data transfer time.

The data is also used to produce external reports which you can link to from your web site or access via xml allowing you to display availability statistics directly on your web site.

At any time you can use the control panel to produce reports and graphs for a given period showing the availability and performance of your service.