Monitoring

Mythic Beasts runs a text message alert system from our servers in the USA. We have now opened this up to customers so customers can use our alerting system to monitor their services.

Monitoring is configured through the Account Control Panel, under 'Services'.

Free ping monitoring

All Mythic Beasts customers who have been allocated an IP address are entitled to free ping monitoring of that IP. We will ping the address once per minute and if we fail to receive a response for five minutes we will SMS the number(s) you have selected with an alert.

To configure monitoring you can add entries using the form in the control panel. You may add as many monitors as you like.

Service	mythic:sphinx	Your service identifier
Host	212.69.37.6	The IP to ping
Alert List	+441223123456,+2512234123456	Comma seperated list of mobile numbers to alert
Active	active	If the monitor should be active now.

Free monitoring includes a maximum of 20 SMS messages per month. Additionaly text messages are charged at 10p per message. In the event of a failure texts would be sent every 15 minutes with the following content.

mythic:sphinx; 2008-03-09 15:06:06; ping failed

Paid Monitoring

Our paid for monitoring allows ping monitoring as above, but you can monitor any ip address or hostname, irrespective of who it is hosted with. Additionally you can set the alert timeout to values other than the default of five minutes.

The Web monitor allows you to check a webpage for content. The following example would fetch the webpage hosted at http://www.mythic-beasts.com/ and alert if the resulting page does not contain the word Mythic for more than two minutes.

Service

mythic:web

Your service identifier

Monitor

URL	http://www.mythic-beasts.com/
String	Mythic

The URL to fetch and the STRING that should be present in the page

Timeout

120

How long to wait in seconds before alerting

Alert List

+441223123456,+2512234123456

Comma seperated list of mobile numbers to alert

Active

active

The paid for monitoring service includes up to 50 text messages per month and up to 50 seperate monitors, and costs £5 per month or £50 per year. Paid for monitoring is available to all customers.

Our monitoring service is intelligent enough to combine messages, if you have multiple web monitors on the same host the messages would be combined so you would only be charged for one message.