Pingdom

SECTION ONE: PROCESS OVERVIEW

Pingdom is used for website monitoring, to check if the website is up and accessible by visitors. In case the page is down (for whatever reason), we are notified by a text message and an email. These notifications are sent both when the page goes down but also when the page is back online (this can be disabled).

SECTION TWO: PROCESS EXECUTION

Log in to: https://www.pingdom.com/

You will see 4 main options:

RUM - visitor insights crossover between hotjar and google analytics - when people visit our page, for how long, etc

Uptime - the most important part that we use

Page speed - you can test how long does it take for our pages to load

Transactions - you can test your forms, new feature, haven’t really used it, but definitely worth exploring

Uptime

You can monitor multiple pages on a single website. But when the whole site goes down, you will receive an alert for each of them individually - which can be pretty annoying. The same happens when the whole server goes down - since there are 40 checks, it will send 40 text messages and 40 emails when it goes down and then again when it goes back online.

To add a new check, click “add new” in the right upper corner:

Enter the check name, check interval (don’t use 1min, use 5min - as it can be slowing down the page that you are monitoring by sending out too many requests) and keep the “test from” on default.

If the first check fails, it tests the page instantly from another location to confirm. If both fail, then the page is considered to be down.

Scroll further down for alert settings. Who should be contacted and under what conditions. It is not good to use 5mindown time for notifications in case there is a false positive, it is better to wait 2 full rounds of failed checks to consider it down:

Then you can disable the alert when the page is back online and set integrations (we don’t use any as of April 2020):

Scroll back up and check “optional” tab and put there a string that should be on the page. If the check is not possible to find the string on the page, it is considered down.

Really useful as sometimes the Leadpages plugin can fail, disconnect and stop displaying the right pages - it would be replaced by a default wordpress page. The server is still online, so is the wordpress, so pingdom would not notify you. So select a string that is really specific for this page, like the header:

Scroll down and check the SSL certificate monitoring as well. It is useful to be notified a couple of days before it expires so that you have enough time to arrange the new certificate:

Then test the check and if all is ok, click save:

In the overview, you can see the history of all pages and which of them are down at the moment and what was the response time of each of those pages:

On the right side you have option to modify the check:

Pause is useful in case there are intermittent issues with the server/wordpress and it is going up/down and still sending text messages and emails.

When you click “view reports”, you can see all details when it was down, for how long and what was the response time: