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We will explain here how server monitoring alerts work and when they are triggered. There is nothing specific that you need to do or set for this to work. It is enabled and working by default on all accounts and all servers.
Scope of Server Monitoring Alerts
The first thing to note about the monitoring system is that it monitors the server itself and the core components of our web stack (Nginx, Varnish, Apache, Memcached, Redis, Elasticsearch, Supervisord, and MySQL). The monitoring system DOES NOT monitor individual sites within your server. This is important so you can avoid any misunderstanding. You can have a website down in your server for a number of reasons such as code exceptions, and wrong configuration. Hence, the monitoring system will not detect it (as the underlying web stack and server are working fine). So, our monitoring system cares about the health of the server and its web stack. For specific applications, you can use something like Pingdom and we are considering adding an add-on for this to our service.
How Does it Work?
We have our own monitoring system that provides constant updates from our servers. Additionally, we have configured all core services of our stack (Nginx, Varnish, Apache, Memcached, Redis, Elasticsearch, Supervisord, and MySQL) to attempt to auto-heal in case they have any issue. Therefore, most issues are sorted out on its own.
Now, when an issue arises, our monitoring system reacts in the following manner:
If there is no contact with the server for 10 minutes, an alert email will be sent to the registered email address of the account the server is in.
When contact with the server is resumed, another email will be sent to the registered email address notifying about the status change.
If any of the core services of the stack is down for more than 10 minutes (thus the auto-healing will have failed for whatever reason), an alert email will be sent to the registered email address of the account the server is in.
Similarly, when the service comes back live, another email will be sent to the registered email address notifying about the status change.
You can also configure channels via our CloudwaysBot (Slack integration, API, email, etc.) and add your team members to receive monitoring alerts about servers, applications, security, performance, etc.
Our aim here, while keeping you updated on what’s going on with your servers, is to try to minimize the number of emails and the number of false positives that you receive. We ensure that we have tried to recover the server/services automatically and that we have enough evidence that things are not going to be sorted by themselves.
Further adjustments may be necessary to the system to achieve this and, as usual, we will highly appreciate your feedback, you may do so on the Feedback page.
That’s it! We hope this article was helpful. If you need any help, then feel free to search your query on Cloudways Support Center or contact us via chat (Need a Hand > Send us a Message). Alternatively, you can also create a support ticket.