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Performance Issues & Any False-Positives You May Have Received

Uptime Robot has been a very stable service for a long time. Yet, for the last few weeks, we know that some users have received false-positives.

Why did that happen?

In short, the servers we used couldn’t handle the load :).

In detail, we always look for ways to heavily optimize the system and the engine to minimize the need for new CPU, RAM or diskspace. The optimizations vary from perfecting the queries used or compressing not-frequently-used-data to choosing the right platforms for the right job. But, we experienced that, how much you optimize, every system has a limit and you shall grow that system before getting close to that limit.

What are the actions taken?

We have added more servers and strengthened the current ones.

And, besides the servers added, from now on, we’ll be adding new ones before the load gets heavier so that the system will always stay healthy.

Additionally, various new controls are added to the engine to minimize false-positives and Uptime Robot will “very” soon start verifying downtimes from multiple locations at once (rather than the current setup which is 1 remote location).

What are the new IPs (if you need to whitelist them)?

There is now an additional engine and 4 more remote nodes to verify downtimes. The up-to-date list of IPs can be found at Locations & IPs page.

To sum up, just wanted to inform you that our hands are on it.

32 replies on “Performance Issues & Any False-Positives You May Have Received”

Today I only received an UP message by e-mail, not a DOWN message. Checking the dashboard, I saw that the monitored website seemed to have been down for 46 minutes.
I did shortly notice that the site was down but didn’t think anything of it, I thought it was some short hiccup. Only as soon as I received the UP message I realised the site really was down just a moment before.

In the strictest sense you can’t call this a false-positive, so I wonder whether or not it has the same cause?

This is exactly the response I was hoping to see! I’m happy to see you quickly acknowledge the problem, and present your plan to solve it.

Hi,
Thanks Uptimerobot team. Nice to know you’re working to improve even more this fantastic service.
I think I have the opposite – a false negative – or a non-reported positive.
I monitor 9 sites, for 8 the records seems to be OK, with the correct up/down ‘pairs’.
One of the sites had down periods for the last days, right now it is working perfectly but the dashboard reports a down event since 02-09-2014 03:28:33. The dashboard graphic is ‘green’ but i don´t see the ‘up’ register at the list.
Would you please review it?
Best wishes.

Just checked and seems like it is all ok now (we regularly run a log maintenance which auto-fixes such issues if they ever appear).

I have seen a lot of up/down messages that are false positives. We monitor our Remote Desktop Gateway and if it was down at 6:30CST in the morning my phone would be blowing up with calls from the east coast. Not a big deal. But can give one a small panic attach when they check their email and see all the down messages.

Overall I love this service. IT’s saved my butt a few times. Keep up the good work guys.

So great to know that you like Uptime Robot.

We are aware of the false-positives that day and, after that, we have applied a bunch of updates and completely fixed that issue.

We are aware of the false-positives that day and, after that, we have applied a bunch of updates and completely fixed that issue.

Hi guys

I’ve had approx 50+ false positives in the past 12 hours, just had one a few mins ago.

I’m also monitoring the same site via StatusCake and that hasn’t reported any outages, so something funky is going on with your reporting.

Each time I get a down notification I can confirm the site is in fact up and running??

Any ideas how I might solve that ?

Uptimerobot has been working great for me, until early this morning. I got a report that my site is DOWN, but it isn’t. I’ve tried pausing/restarting the monitor, and it is still saying the site is down. Been that way for over 8 hours now.

Hi – I too iterate Heath….

Service has been great – until right now – receiving lots of false positives….

I just set up my pushover text notifications – but am going to need to turn the monitoring off at this rate as it keeping me awake.

My site is up but reported as up and down 4 times in the past hour.

Gary,

Just replied the support ticket of yours but want to share the info here as well (hard to know which one reaches faster).

The notifications are due to HTTP 500 statuses returned and I can tell that such HTTP-status-based notifications are 100% accurate.

And they can be verified through the HTTP logs of the site.

Hi there,
Still seeing false positives. Had 2 of our 7 monitors report a down condition for 26 minutes this morning. Funny thing was, I was actually on one of the websites in question when this occurred. I quickly checked the other and it was up as well. Heart was racing for a bit, but all’s good.

Hey – My earlier post was quite inaccurate – uptime robot was quite correct in reporting my sites down. Turns out that MySQL was going down intermittently and each time I checked my site was up.

So thanks to Uptime Robot I was able to troubleshoot the error and have it fixed before any of my clients noticed the site was down.

Great service guys.

This is by far the most accurate service monitoring to date – and I have accounts with Pingdom and Hyperspin – sometimes these don’t even see my site go down but UR does – and with the pushover notification I get alerted immediately.

Thanks Guys

Hello, we have lot of false-positive on port 8080 (today 5 for one domain) and it is indicating, that site is still down (but site si up). What can we do? We have allowed all of you IPs and your robot user-agent. Thank you!

Just found this post here and even though it’s from 2014, I want to note that on one of my domains (mostly the one) I’m constantly getting down- and up-messages, around a pair of them 5 to 6 times a day. During the first couple of weeks I would immediately race to see what’s wrong with the website, but it was always fine, not even much going on, and 5 minutes later the up-message arrives, so now I mostly just delete these emails (not wanting to filter them out automatically) which is an annoyance. Would be nice if things became as reliable again as they once were…

got a false negative going on at the moment – can you help? does a slow site sometimes show as a down site? (we know it’s slow and are working on that!)

We have been receiving false negatives for weeks now to many of our sites. We have checked with our Server Provider & cPanel to confirm the sites are in fact still up and running throughout each notification.

Hi there,

please contact our support with all the details like your monitor names, timestamps of the events, etc., we will be happy to take a look at it, thank you.

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