Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

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Small Update: Notification Messages Now Include The Amount Of Downtime

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Yellow Clock IconThis is a very small feature and wanted to activate it before rolling the bigger update that is being working on.

When a monitor goes "down" first and "up" afterwards, Uptime Robot used to send the info: "The monitor XY (http://www.xy.com/) is back up".

Right now, it includes the amount of downtime so you won't have to compare the date-times of the notifications for finding the value. It is now like: "The monitor XY (http://www.xy.com/) is back up (it was down since 1 days, 2 hours, 07 minutes and 57 seconds)".

Hope you like it : ).

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Posted in Announcements | 21 Comments »

New Feature – Monitoring Ports

Monday, April 4th, 2011

Here comes a "frequently requested feature": Monitoring Ports.

Uptime Robot now enables you to monitor any port/service (like HTTP, FTP, DNS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, etc.) and find out if they are responding or not.

Under the re-organized "Add New Monitor" menu, the feature can be reached by simply selecting "TCP Ports".

After that, Uptime Robot will be displaying a list of pre-defined/popular ports and the ability to define a custom port.

Port Monitoring

There are usually 2 status options while monitoring a service, it can be:

  • up
  • or down

However, there is a 3rd option from Uptime Robot's point of view: it can also be filtered/firewalled. Simply, it can be up or down but the status can not be detected as any requests (like Uptime Robot does) are blocked.

Good news is; if the port/service is behind a firewall and blocks any requests, inside the "down" e-mail notification, you'll see that Uptime Robot mentions this information.

So, if you have the chance of whitelisting IPs that can reach to the port. If you prefer to, whitelisting Uptime Robot's IPs would help the monitor to work (IPs can be found in the "About" page.).

Hope you like this new feature and, now, we can focus on some more tasty stuff : )

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Posted in Announcements | 17 Comments »

Uptime Robot Interface Becomes Much More Speedy

Friday, March 25th, 2011

Uptime Robot is generating and keeping 1000s of logs each day in order to display reports and help you reach the past data.

There are already millions of records and, as expected, working with huge datasets normally end up in a slower experience.

Faster Interface

We were working hard to improve the speed of the Uptime Robot interface, specially the "My Monitors" page that uses these logs to generate the "24 hours status" and "stats" link where you can go back to 2 months.

After lots of tweaks, the loading speeds of these pages are now ~16 times faster which will -hopefully- help you save time.

Just login and experience it yourself : ).

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Posted in Announcements | 4 Comments »

New Feature: View Past Events/Logs

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

If you every want to find out the date-time of a specific downtime or how long it had taken, the only option was to check the date-times of the notifications sent (from e-mails- tweets, text messages or RSS).

Statistics ButtonHere is a new feature which is asked most by Uptime Robot users: "ability to view past events/logs".

The past events can be reached from a new (statistics) icon in the "My Monitors" page.

Once clicked, it'll display every detail -including up, down, paused, started events- for the last 2 months (for now).

Latest Events

Also, with the help of an "info icon" you can find out "the alert contacts notified".

And, all of this wrapped up in an easy-to-use Ajaxed interface.

P.S. This is actually the 1st part of the statistics and reporting module being built. Expect much more soon!

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Posted in Announcements | 26 Comments »

(Another) New Monitoring IP (important for monitors behind a firewall)

Friday, January 7th, 2011

Tip: While using Uptime Robot until now, if you didn't need to do anything with the IPs of the service, then feel free to skip this post. Actually 99.9% of the users don't need this info.

Around a month ago, we had shared that a new IP was added to our engine to strengthen the system.

However, we experienced that, rather than distributing the engine into small pieces (servers), distributing it into huge ones will end up in a much better performance -what were we thinking: )-.

And now, we have that huge engine ready and will be activated by 11 January 2011 and some other IPs will become obsolete.

Until now, if you had whitelisted (or blacklisted) the IPs of Uptime Robot, please add:

  • 74.86.158.106 into your list as the new IP.

Also, starting by 1 February 2011:

  • 67.228.76.131 will no longer be in use.

Please feel free to ask anything in the comments or as a support ticket (support@uptimerobot.com).

P.S. All IPs used can be found in the About page.

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Posted in Announcements | 11 Comments »

A New Monitoring IP (important if you have a firewall)

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

In order to make Uptime Robot faster and more stable, a new server is being added to the tiny : ) cluster (3 machines now).

If you're using a firewall and had needed to unblock the IPs of the service, than you may want to unblock this new IP as well: 74.86.179.131.

Also, it can be necessary if you have excluded the IPs in your statistics application.

The new IP will be active by 03 December 2010.

Posted in Announcements | 4 Comments »

New Monitor Type – Ping (That Old And Simple Command)

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

Today, Uptime Robot adds a new monitor type besides the http(s) and keyword checking: Ping.

It is actually the most basic command to find out if a network is up or down.

How does it differ from http(s)?

Http(s) monitoring sends a request to the web server and, in return, gets a status code from the server (like 200, 404, etc.). So, the server that the website hosted on can be up, other websites on it can be working but it may only be your website.

Ping looks for if the IP of your website is reachable or not. It is a better fit to monitor uptimes of servers/networks.

Should I use both http(s) and Ping for a website?

There is no need for that. If the aim is to monitor a website uptime, then http(s) monitoring should be enough as it'll notify you when the server can not be pinged as well.

However, if you have a dedicated server or a VPS, using Ping for the server IP besides the websites on that server is a good idea.

 

This is also an important step for Uptime Robot as how monitor types are handled both on the frontend and backend are now changed to let us adding new monitor types easier :) .

Posted in Announcements | 16 Comments »

Support For Self-Signed SSL Certificates (And How HTTPS URLs Are Handled)

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Since the beginning, Uptime Robot was supporting URLs with SSL certificates (https).

However, self-signed certificates (the ones with unknown CAs) were not supported as they were generating errors like "unknown certificate", etc. and Uptime Robot was considering these websites to be down.

Today, URLs with self-signed certificates are now supported just like any other URL (as you already know the certificate is self-signed and no need to throw alerts).

On the other hand, for any type of https URLs, if the certificate is an invalid one (like the common name and URL not matching) or the date is expired, Uptime Robot will keep sending a down alert.

Posted in Announcements | 2 Comments »

Free Timezones Database (For Your Web Apps)

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Timezone IconLately, we have added "custom timezones" to Uptime Robot where users can select their timezone to view any report in their own date and time.

You may be willing to add something similar to your own application as well and it takes some time to find the values for timezones or cities and countries they cover.

As we already have it, want to share the data (something simple but can save time):

Download the timezones database in .SQL format.

Posted in Announcements | 9 Comments »

Last 24 Hours Status And Custom Timezones

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Since the launch of Uptime Robot, we're analyzing the cost of keeping logs in means of performance and size.

With lots of tweaks to our engine and code, Uptime Robot now saves every action to present them as reports and charts.

The first report activated is the "Last 24 Hours Status" which can be found in the "My Monitors" page like below:

Last 24 Hours Status

The report displays the events (up/down/paused) within a timeline and it is interactive. You can hover any event to find out the details about it.

In order to view the dates and times in your own timezone, we have added a "timezone" field inside the "My Settings" page which you can select your own and the report (+ all feature reports) will be displayed with that timezone.

P.S. The report tooltips are a little buggy in IE (working on a fix) but they work nice in all other browsers.

Posted in Announcements | 18 Comments »

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