SERVER CHECK PRO OVERVIEW

Q: What is Server Check Pro?

A: Server Check Pro is a service that allows you to monitor the availability of your HTTP server. Much like a security service monitors a business or home, Serve Check Pro monitors your server and informs you if something is not working as it should. With Server Check Pro, you can:

• Monitor multiple URLs every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day
• Customize testing events
• Create custom notifications - via email, numeric pager, or Alphanumeric pager
• Review your server's performance with both tables and graphical displays
• Compare performance from multiple monitoring sites - we have monitoring sites in Dallas, Texas, and San Francisco, California, in the USA and London, England.

Server Check Pro monitors your site so you don't have to.

Q: What is the difference between Server Check Basic and Server Check Pro?

A: Server Check Basic is a free service that we offer to allow NetMechanic users to try our services. Server Check Basic will test your URL every 15 minutes for 8 hours. This test is performed from our US monitoring station only. At the end of this time, an email message will be sent indicating the URL of the summary report. This report is available on our server for two days.

Server Check Pro is a subscription service that adds long term monitoring, monitoring from multiple stations, custom notifications, pager notifications, and monitoring of multiple URLs. In addition, you can review the last week's performance data online. See pricing information for subscription cost.

Q: Can I get a tour of Server Check Pro?

A: Absolutely. You can login as "guest" (no password required) and see our interface and features including a sample URL monitored from all our monitoring stations.

Q: Why do you use multiple monitoring stations?

A: Using multiple stations ensures that notifications sent for your web site aren't due to the load on our monitoring station, or network quirks between your server and ours. When one of our stations detects a problem, it polls our other stations to confirm that they're seeing the same problem. This multiple confirmation helps reduce false alarms. You're notified only if all servers report the same problem. Also, using multiple servers gives you an idea of the performance seen by users in different geographic locations. For example, our London server lets you see how an American server looks to European clients.

Q: Does your service support Secure Socket Layer for ecommerce transactions?

A: Yes, Server Check Pro capabilities include monitoring pages requiring Secure Socket Layer connections. This enables us to monitor all "https" sites for performance and downtime. HTTPS is normally slower and if there's too much information on the secure server, visitors abandon the shopping cart.

Q: Do you test password-protected (.htaccess) sites?

A: Yes, we can test sites using .htaccess password protection, so long as the "basic" authentication method is used. To test a password-protected site, enter your URL in this form: http://username:password@www.domainname.com

Please keep in mind that your password will be transmitted over an open network in unencoded format. NetMechanic is not responsible for the security of your site. We recommend methods other than .htaccess to protect highly sensitive information.

Q: What is a Ping?

A: 'Ping' is a network utility that monitors the time delay and reliability of messages sent across the network. A small message is sent, and the receiving computer immediately sends a response message. By monitoring the time delay and percentage of responses that are received, we can estimate the network reliability and latency. We also use ping to determine whether your host computer is online. Failure to respond to a ping indicates that your computer is either down or not connected to the Net.

Q: What is an IP address?

An IP (or Internet Protocol) address is a series of four numbers that uniquely identifies your machine. Every machine connected to the Internet has an Internet "address" that identifies that machine to other machines. A domain name (such as netmechanic.com) is bound to an IP address (207.158.244.228), through the use of Domain Name Service (DNS) tables. When your domain name was registered, two DNS servers were assigned to provide the domain name to IP address translation. Users receiving a numeric page notification about their site will receive the last two numbers of their IP address as part of the pager notification. See Section 6.0 for more details on paging.

Q: What is a Notification?

A: A notification is an email address or pager phone number that we can use to notify you of an event. You can set up different email addresses for different people in your organization and pager notifications to page either numeric or alphanumeric pagers. See Section 5.0 for details on setting up notifications.

Q: What is an Event?

A: A Server Check Pro event is any situation that we test for when monitoring your site. If an event is triggered, we will send out any notifications that have been attached to that particular event. Events can be problems (such as "Server Offline") or they can be regular situations (such as "Weekly Summary"). For more information on what events we monitor, see Section 6.0

Q: What is an URL?

A: An Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a text string that identifies a web page or other resource (e.g.. FTP, telnet). NetMechanic uses the URL of your web page to determine which HTTP server to access and which page to download.

Q: Does the URL have to be a web page?

Server Check Pro monitors HTTP servers (also known as Web servers). The URLs you enter must therefore be HTTP addresses. The URL you enter will be verified to check for typos, existence of the domain, etc. We do not currently monitor FTP, mailto, or other forms of URLs.

Q: Can I use a CGI script for my URL?

A: Yes, but only if it uses the GET method. The URL must include the query string in this case. The easiest way to capture the query string for entry into Server Check Pro is to access the page in your browser and then copy and paste the URL location directly from the browser into the URL Name box on the Add New URL page.

Q: What is a grade, and how is it computed?

We compute the "grade" for a site on a given day by computing the time required to download a notional 10 KByte file. This time takes into account the time to open a connection to your server and the data transfer rate of your server in bytes per second (BPS). This data transfer rate is determined by the total time required to download your file and the size of the file. We use this BPS number to compute the time which would be required to download a 10 KByte file. Your grade is based on this time, plus the time required to establish a connection. Basing your performance grade on a notional 10k file ensures that comparisons across servers are roughly equal.

Your server is tested every 15 minutes throughout the day, and an average download time is computed. (This value is also available as a part of the summary table at the top of your report.) After the average for your site is computed, this number is compared to similar data gathered for all of the sites we monitor - both customers and other representative sites. Your grade is then based its on percentile rank, which indicates the percentage of servers which performed worse than yours. For example, if your server received a percentile rank of 70, this indicates that it performed better than 70% of the servers we tested. We grade each performance category by assigning it a percentile rank.

In addition, we assign your server an overall grade of "Excellent," "Very Good," etc. This grade is based on the percentile grade assigned to your download time for a 10 KByte file and is labeled as follows:

Percentile Rank	Grade
80th Percentile or Better	Excellent
60th - 80th Percentile	Very Good
40th - 60th Percentile	Good
20th - 40th Percentile	Fair
Below 20th Percentile	Poor

Q: How can I use the grade?

A: The grade is computed to allow you to have a single value that says "my site is doing well." This can be used to get a quick summary of your server's performance for one given day vs. another. A degradation of performance for a given site over time would usually indicate that the server is getting overloaded, that traffic at your network point of access is congested, or that a recent change is adversely affecting performance. If, for example, you had been consistently running at a 'Very Good' grade, you might want to know if you dropped to a 'Fair'' grade. Even if the server hasn't dropped off line, it would indicate that service was slower that usual.

Keep in mind that your grade represents a sampling of your server's performance over the course of the day. As such the performance we measure has a margin of error, just like an opinion poll. Your server's grade will also be affected by network traffic and the backbone between your site and our monitoring station, so it may vary several percentage point due to factors outside of your server. Your grade should be read as a general indicator of performance, not a fine grain measurement.

Q: What are the effects of physical distance on performance?

A: Performance is affected to some degree by the distance between your computer and our monitoring station. If your server is located in Australia, for example, you can expect its grade to be lower than a comparable server located in the United States. We address this difference through the use of multiple monitoring points having different backbone connectivity.

Network connection speed is one of the biggest factors affecting your performance. If your server is connected via an ISDN line it will likely perform worse than a comparable server connected via T1 line. The number of Web sites sharing your backbone connection is also a factor.

Q: What are the effects of network connection speed?

A: Network connection speed at your server is one of the biggest factors affecting your performance. If your server is connected via an ISDN line it will likely perform worse than a comparable server connected via T1 line. The number of Web sites sharing your backbone connection is also a factor. For example, a dedicated ISDN line linked directly to the backbone could be faster than a T1 line shared by a large number of users.

Q: How does my IPP's choice of upstream providers affect performance?

Generally speaking, greater geographical separation between your server and our monitoring station means greater network latency. Transmission of data from your server to us involves routing through several relay points, with each relay adding a small delay. However, this relationship is not linear. The relay delay will be greater for points which involve a change of backbone. For example, if a relay point involves changing from Sprint to MCI, this will involve a greater delay. This is one of the reasons why the exact impact of network performance on your server is difficult to measure precisely.

How much does network performance affect my grade?

To get an idea how much network performance affects your grade it is useful to compare the performance assigned to your server between two of our stations. If you are not a Server Check Pro user, you can see this difference by taking our guest tour. Login as "guest", then follow the "View Stats" link. This will allow you to see the performance difference of a sample URL as seen by all of our monitoring stations.

Q: What is your backbone connectivity?

A: Our Dallas, Texas, station is located at Keynote System's Dallas Network Operations Center. This facility has diverse network connectivity with dedicated connections to UUNet, AT&T, Internap and Level3.

Our London monitoring station is located at Rackspace and features multiple dedicated OC48's with full redundancy in routing and switching as well as transit and transport paths.

Our third monitoring station is located at our corporate headquarters in San Mateo California with facilities similar to our operations center in Dallas.

Q: What is the "NetMechanic Average" and how is it computed?

The NetMechanic Average is based on the performance of the last 2000 servers tested by our service. Each time a Server Check 8 hour monitoring period is completed or a day's worth of testing for Server Check Pro is completed, the average performance for that job becomes a data point in this average. Note that, since this is a rolling average, these numbers may change slightly from week to week.

Q: What affect does the load on your server have on my grade?

The load on any one of our monitoring stations can have an effect on the performance we report for your site. We monitor the load on our stations continuously to avoid this. Though heavy load conditions are rare, they are possible. This is one of the reasons we use multiple stations to monitor your site

Q: My server was better than the average, but it only ranked in the 45th percentile. Why?

A: Keep in mind that the NetMechanic Average represents the mean performance for a given category. The 50th percentile represents the median performance. So it is possible for your server to be above average and still fall below the 50th percentile.

SERVER CHECK PRO ROBOTS

Aren't Robots Dangerous?

In the early years of the World Wide Web (circa 1992) ill-mannered robots were a problem. Web crawlers would blunder through a site without regard for the privacy of the data or the effect on server load that their visit would have The Robot Exclusion Standard was developed to allow the web developer to control/limit the access to their site. Our Server Check Pro robot abides by this standard. If you have excluded robots from your site, our robot will not be able to monitor your site unless you add the following entry into the robots.txt file for your server.

User-agent: NetMechanic
Disallow:

In addition, our robot will only retrieve files designated by you as part of your account setup. Our robot will also visit your site no more than once every 15 minutes per monitoring station. So the load impact of our robots on your server is minimal.

Q: What effect will Server Check Pro have on my hit count?

Our robot will visit your site every fifteen minutes, so you should expect an extra 96 hits a day for each URL monitored on that server from each of our monitoring stations. If you are concerned about getting an accurate picture of the number of non-robot hits on your site, you can configure a unique page on your site for our robot to visit, and can then ignore these hits when counting the page hits for the month.

Q: Can I identify Server Check Pro traffic by IP address?

Yes, you can. We currently monitor from three distinct monitoring stations. The names and corresponding IP addresses of these machines are outlined below. You may want to use these names/IP addresses to selectively remove Server Check Pro traffic from your web log analysis. You may also need this information to allow Server Check Pro access through an office firewall. Since these IP addresses may change from time to time, we recommend filtering by machine name rather than IP address where possible.

Monitoring Station	DNS Name	IP Address
Dallas, Texas, USA	scp.netmechanic.com	63.94.64.80
London, England	scplon.netmechanic.com	212.100.224.110
San Francisco, CA USA	scpsfo.netmechanic.com	65.198.48.65

NOTIFICATIONS

Q: How do I set up a Notification?

A: Choose Add New Notification from the Server Check Pro Control Panel. This will display the Server Check Pro Wizard and will walk you though the steps needed to create a Notification.

Q: What should I name my Notifications?

Good names for notifications typically take the "verb noun" approach. For example: Page Mike, email Susan, email Tech are simple and easy to recognize. Since you can tie the same notification to several different events, it's not a good idea name a notification by the event for which it will be used (e.g. Server Down, My Home Page). Doing this will make reusing the notification for an event less clear. Think of the notification name in terms of "What should NetMechanic do if this event occurs?"

For example: Joe is monitoring his company's web site. He has an email account and also carries a numeric pager. In this case, he might configure three notifications: email Joe, Page Joe, and email Susan (his colleague). He would then use the first two notifications for most of the events that he is monitoring, and use the last to send a Weekly Summary to keep Susan informed of the server's general performance.

Q: Can I use a Notification more than once?

A: Yes. The same notification can be attached to multiple events.

Q: Are there any guidelines for setting up my notifications?

A: For email notifications be sure that the address is not the same as the server you're monitoring. If the server is offline it affects your mail delivery - including outage notifications. Use an address on a separate server from the monitored one.

Q: Are there any special tricks for configuring SCP to use my cell phone?

A; Many cell phone services offer "text messaging" - emails sent to your cell phone. Many SCP customers use cell phones in lieu of alphanumeric pagers. You should keep in mind the following caveats:

· Cell phone coverage is limited. You can't receive messages if you are out of coverage.
· Cell phone plans limit the number of received messages per month - this could keep you from receiving the message.
· Cell phones often encounter long delays in email reception.

 

EVENTS

Q: What kind of events do the Server Check Pro robots test?

• The Weekly Summary is used to issue a message that summarizes the server's performance over the last week.
• The Server Offline event will trigger an event each time we try to access your site and we cannot access your machine. In order to fail this event, your machine must fail a "ping" test; your machine should respond to this ping test even if the Web server is not running. No ping response means that it is likely that the machine is down or disconnected from the network.
• The No HTTP Response event used to monitor if the Web server is off-line or severely overloaded. You can specify the amount of time required before we will judge your server to be unresponsive.
• The Server Grade event is used to notify you if the server's performance drops below a certain minimum performance during a 24 hour period . See Section 2.8 for more details on grades.
• The Missing Keyword event can be used to verify that the entire web page is being correctly served by your server. This event can also be used to verify correct output is being generated by a CGI script. You enter one or more keywords that appears somewhere within your Web page (within a comment is OK). If our robot does not see this word when the page is retrieved, a notification is sent. Note that your keyword or phase will be check exactly as typed, including spacing and capitalization. If you wish to check for multiple keywords which do not appear next to each other in your document, you can add multiple Missing Keyword events.

Q: Can I tailor the thresholds for events?

A: The No HTTP Response event can be adjusted to your specifications. Most browsers "timeout" if they receive no response within 30 seconds. You can set this threshold to values ranging from 10 to 60 seconds.

Q: I have 10 (or 50, or 2000) web pages on my server. Do I need to set up notifications for each one?

A: No. Server Check Pro monitors the HTTP server's performance. You need to monitor only one URL per server. You might consider monitoring more than one page on the same server if those pages are CGI scripts and you want to measure the performance of that particular script vs. another non-CGI page.

Q: My server will be down for maintenance. What should I do about notification events for this URL?

A: Toggle off (make "inactive") any events with pager notifications if you plan on being down for a period of time. Email events can be toggled off as well, if desired.

To deactivate the specific events themselves, log into your account, to the Change Events link, select the URL you want to change, then set any events you want to turn off to "inactive". This will deactivate the event. Or, to deactivate monitoring of the URL log into your account, follow the Change Status link, and then set the status of your URL to "inactive". This will deactivate monitoring of your URL.

 

PAGERS

What alphanumeric pagers do you support?

We support pagers that support the TAP/IXO/PET alphanumeric protocol. Virtually all alphanumeric pagers use this protocol. We provide support for many National Paging Centrals, including:

• GTE MobileNet 
• MobileComm 
• PageMart 
• PageNet 
• and SkyTel 

In addition, we can also support calling local and long distance regional Paging Centrals. If you don't see your national service listed, contact us and we'll see about adding it.

Q: I have a numeric pager. How do I interpret the pages I receive?

A: The general form of a numeric page notification is as follows: XXX-YYY-0ZZZ

Where: XXX is the error code

· 100 = Server Off-line. Does not even respond to pings.
· 200 = no HTTP response within requested timeout period.
· 300 = Low server grade.
· 400 = No error. We use this to send weekly summary.
· 500 = Keyword Not Found.
· 999 = No error. We use this to test your pager.

YYY is the third IP Address number.

ZZZ is the fourth IP Address number. The IP address numbers allow you to distinguish error messages while monitoring more than one site.

Q: To what events should I attach a pager notification?

A: We currently support several events. Of these it makes most sense to attach a pager notification to Server Offline and to No HTTP. These are the high priority events that one would like to know about immediately, because they mean that the URL was not accessible. You might also want a pager notification sent for Keyword not found. We do not support sending our Weekly Summary event to a pager address.

Q: Can I create my own error codes?

A: No

Q: How much does Server Check Pro cost?

A: Server Check Pro costs a one time USD $9.99 setup fee, plus USD $19.99 month per URL monitored.

Q: What about paging? Doesn't that cost extra?

If you have a toll-free paging service, there is no additional fee for paging. Otherwise, pages cost USD $0.35 each. These fees will appear on your next month's bill.

Q: When will I be billed?

A: The bill for the setup fee and base monthly fee will be sent when you sign up. The first month's base fee will be prorated to the start of the next calendar month, and you will be billed monthly from then on.

Q: If I have one URL with 2 different events (i.e., Host Computer off-line & No HTTP Response) would I be charged for 2 web pages even though they are the same URL?

A: No. You are billed based on the number of URLs tested - not the number of tests performed on an URL. It works like this: The first URL tested on a given day is included in the monthly base fee. This is regardless of the number of tests made on a given URL. Long distance paging notification is extra (USD $0.35 per page). Any additional URLs tested will be billed based on the price structure from the table below.

Days Tested	Price
1-10	$10
11-20	$15
21-30	$19.99

Q: If I want to be e-mailed and paged for the same event (i.e., both e-mailed and paged for a 60 second No HTTP response for the same URL) will I be charged twice for this?

A: No. You could have 1,2 or 10 notifications on the same URL and you would be billed only for having the URL active. Emails and toll-free paging would create no additional charge. The exception: if you are being "paged" for these events via a long distance call, there will be a small fee charged for the call.

Q: Can I review my charges online?

Yes. Log on to your account, then follow the Review Billing link. You will see your charges for the current month.  

Q: Do you take credit cards?

Yes, we accept VISA, MasterCard (EuroCard), American Express, and Discover. You can enter your card number through our secure server during sign up.

Q: The cost of my Server Check Pro account is $19.99 per month. It has always been $19.99.  Why is it higher than $19.99 this month?

When a customer's server goes down, NetMechanic will begin paging you to let you know about the problem. Occasionally pages are not answered and paging tolls begin to occur. If you have a toll-free paging service, there is no additional fee for paging. Otherwise, pages cost USD $0.35 each. These fees will appear on your next month's bill.

How do I cancel my existing Server Check Pro subscription?

While we appreciate your business, we understand that there may come a time where you have outgrown our monitoring service (perhaps to upgrade to our more full featured sister service, Red Alert (http://www.redalert.com). Server Check Pro bases its charges on the usage of our system. If you suspend or cancel ALL of the monitoring for your account, you will incur no additional charges. To suspend or cancel monitoring, choose the "Change Status" link from the Server Check Pro Control Panel.

Note that since Server Check Pro bills in arrears, you are still responsible for all charges incurred prior to that date. You may receive one additional charge to your credit card at the beginning of the following month to settle these charges.

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