Need help monitoring a server?
No problem! With our Advanced Monitoring service (coupled with our Plus or Pro DNS) you can be sure that your service is protected. Our service allows you to monitor up to 20* different records to ensure uptime and, in the case of a failure, automatic failover to an option of your choice. You can also configure the service to send out notifications so that you’re never out of the loop. With No-IP Advanced Monitoring, you can monitor anything that has a network address. A few examples would be: web server, mail server, FTP server, router, VPN device or file server.
How it Works
The Advanced Monitoring service performs a check to each of your selected servers once every 5 minutes from two geographically different servers (with a third on backup). If two of these servers find that your service is unreachable, the service is placed into offline mode (if selected) and the host is updated to the offline option within 60 seconds. Meanwhile, the monitoring service continues sending a check every 5 minutes to verify that the server is still offline. If the service reports that it’s back online, your settings will be reverted to the online settings.
Getting Started
To start, you will need to purchase the service from either the “Monitoring” tab of your account or from the services page.
Note: Be sure that you have already purchased No-IP’s Plus or Pro service. No-IP managing the DNS for your domain is required to utilize the failover service. Without it, we have no way of performing the change for you.
It’s now time to start configuring:
- Click on the “Server Monitoring” tab on the left.
- Click “Actions > Configure” next to your domain.
- Nothing there yet, so click “Add Monitor”.
- Select the service you want to monitor from the drop-down menu and click “Next”.
- Choose the record that you would like to check.
We’ve now reached the bread and butter of this service. Here, you will make the specific rules for the monitor to follow. For example, I selected a TCP check. A TCP check is 7 times out of 10 the best route to go when configuring a monitor.
In the drop-down menu, you will notice a huge list of available ports to monitor. If you do not see yours, please contact us and we will get it added in. I have selected to check the TCP port of 3389 (common RDP) — this says that monitoring should send a TCP request to 3389 once every 5 minutes to verify that the port is accessible or not on my hostname’s current IP address. By setting the monitor to “active” and the offline settings to “yes”, the monitoring service will then perform the check and any time the host is unavailable on that port, it will switch over to one of the selected offline options.
You may have a question like “Where do I set my offline options”?
In order to set the offline options you have to disable the active monitor. To do this, please follow the following steps:
- First, log into your No-IP portal.
- Then navigate the left menu bar to My Services > Server Monitoring.
- Next, click Configure and then click the Edit button on the monitoring service you wish to disable.
- To disable, toggle the Active radio option to “No” and click “Update”.
You will then modify the hostname’s offline settings by:
- Navigating the left menu bar again to My Services > DNS records.
- Locate the hostname then click Modify next to it.
- Under Offline Options add the preferred offline settings – be it a new IP address, URL, or a configurable offline page. Then click Update Hostname.
After you have set your offline options, you can come back to the service using the same steps above and activate the monitor by selecting yes under Active. Be sure to select the offline options here as well. You can also configure notification settings regarding the monitor with the ability to specify what events you would like to be notified on. Click “Create” and you have added your first service to be monitored.
Now What Can I Do?
And what do these messages mean? You can check on the status of any monitor by going to the “Status” section under the monitoring tab. You can also view the logs of any of your monitors by selecting “Configure” and then “Log.” You can filter your log based on status to get an idea of the frequency of your service’s up/down time. There are three messages that you may see:
- OK – which means that everything is online and no errors at this time.
- Warning – which means that something could be wrong with the service, or it took a longer time than normal to be reached.
- Critical – there was a failure on the service.
Hopefully you will always have green!
Where Do I Go For Help?
You can always call on us. Feel free to give us a call during our business hours or submit a support ticket and one of our representatives will be more than happy to assist you.
*Need more than 20 records? Submit a Support Ticket requesting a price quote.