Multiple Uptime Monitors for a single Child site

Open

Administrative
Extension Enhancement
ST

Sanja Tosanovic

2 years ago

Did a client ever call you to say their website was “down”, but Uptime Monitor didn’t detect it?

The reason is often an agressive caching strategy where the homepage is full cached, but as soon as you try to log in the site, or use the cart on an e-commerce site, the experience breaks down.

For this reason, I would like to have the ability to add multiple Uptime Monitors for a single site, so I could elect to monitor not only the homepage, but also the shop, the login page, to ensure over-agressive caching is not masking a problem with the rest of the site.

Today, we can create multiple HTTP monitors, but only the one for the Homepage is showing up on a site’s dashboard screen in MainWP.

In an ideal world, we would be able to associate additional Monitors to a given site, and they would all show up on that child’s dashboard in MainWP.

Anyone interested… anyone? … anyone?

Activity

ZW

Zack Wallace

2 years ago

That makes sense, but not really for the traditional sense of "uptime". The main reason for uptime check is that the hosting is working at all, that it's giving a proper 200 response. So if the server was down, it wouldn't matter if it was checking /page1 or /home/ or /some-article, because the host is down, it would be crashing with a non-200 status.

If the cache was served by WordPress itself, like a cache plugin, it wouldn't matter either because if hosting is down, it'll still crash. It can't serve a cache file any better than a normal file if the hosting is down.

So then what you are talking about is not uptime monitoring for hosting (Apache, PHP, MySQL is working), but you are talking more about visual testing or usability testing. This isn't checking if the hosting is working, it's checking if the functionality and content on the pages are what they are supposed to be.

I do some of this, where I check for specific words on the page. This way if the site is hacked and they replace the home page with porn or something, the server is still "up", but the content changed, my content-based monitor will trigger.


You might look around for visual and usability testing tools rather than just uptime tools.

KG

Kenneth Gourlay

2 quarters ago

Zack makes a reasonable point about these additional monitors not necessarily monitoring "uptime" in the literal sense. However, I also use UptimeRobot to monitor some of these things. It's an easy and effective way to tell if parts of a site's functionality break (e.g. with a plugin update or required service going offline) beyond simply whether the web server returns 200.

Through the Advanced Uptime Monitor extension these monitors show up on my MainWP Overview page, and they seem to be linked to the site overview page based on matching the domain name in the monitor URL. This works as long as the URLs match, I guess. I'm not sure what the site list page shows if one monitor is "up" and another is "down" for the same site, but in my use case I rely on notifications when a monitor goes down, not checking MainWP to see if any are down.


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