Using the watchdog editor

The watchdog maintains a list of checks for your machine which are performed every 5-10 minutes. These checks can do one of the following:

• Ping an IP address associated with your machine.
• Try to fetch a web page from your machine and verify it returns the HTTP status code 200.

Each check as an action associated with it which can be one of two things:

• Send you an email
• Send you an SMS

The email address and SMS phone number are fixed in our contact database: you should make sure your details are kept up-to-date via the control panel for these to work properly.

To access the watchdog editor you should invoke the actions menu of your serial console shell by pressing “Ctrl+p Ctrl+o”. From the actions menu you may select the Watchdogs item from the menu.

The Editor

The editor looks like this:

Adding A New Check

If you’re developing a site for a client who is going to be very sensitive to down time, whatever the cause, it helps to check that a particular page will always fetch correctly.

Using the editor you may add a new rule to ensure the website is up and running as follows:

Select the type of Rule To Add

Enter The IP / URL

Select The Action

You may choose to receive an email upon the event of a failure, or have an SMS sent to the registered phone number associated with your account.

The email address and SMS phone number are fixed in our contact database: you should make sure your details are kept up-to-date via the control panel for these to work properly.

What do the alerts look like?

Here is an example SMS sent by our system: the first word will be either PROBLEM (indicating that a check has failed) or RECOVERY (indicating that the check has succeeded again). The number in brackets is the number of times the message has been sent: repeat PROBLEM alerts will be sent once every 20-30 minutes until the problem is fixed. Then it lists the test name which failed and the DNS name of the host concerned.