Introduction

UniPay supports integration with Pingdom service used for monitoring the state of UniPay/UniBroker nodes. It allows to keep track of the system's stability and react immediately if any issues occur.

In spite of the fact that there are lots of monitoring services on the Internet you can use within UniPay/UniBroker service, such as Nagios or GTmetrix, it is recommended to use Pingdom due to its higher reliability and safety.
The purpose of this guide is to provide instruction on how to configure Pingdom service within your system. To learn more about available Pingdom health checks and pages, review this guide.

Intended Audience

This guide will be useful for environment administrators that want to configure Pingdom checks for monitoring UniPay/UniBroker work.

Monitoring Types

UniPay's Pingdom Module allows to perform the following monitoring types:

• Uptime check – allows to track server's uptime and response time in order to assure its accessibility.
• Downtime check - allows to see how much downtime a server has and how responsive it is in order to ease the troubleshooting.
• Performance check – allows to analyze performance data to obtain actual information about load process and see how data relates to platform, country or browser.

Configuring an uptime Pingdom check

Here is how you can create a simple Pingdom Uptime check:

Login at Pingdom or create a standard user account if you use the service for the first time.
Choose Monitoring tab (1) from the menu on the left and navigate to Uptime perspective (2):


In the right corner of the Monitoring Uptime page press Add New button to create a new check:

In the appeared modal window specify the options for a new check:


1. Add a descriptive name into this field in order to make the new check identifiable.

2. Using the slider you can specify how often should the probe server make a request to your URL. By default, server performs the check every minute to get the most accurate reports as possible.

3. Under three tabs (Email, Network and Web) you will find different check types provided by Pingdom.

4. HTTP check under the Web tab is the most common type of monitoring you can use. Make sure the Web tab and HTTP(S) radio button were selected.

Required Options (under Required tab):


5. Enter the URL you want to check. Specify the testing type: (via plain HTTP or HTTPS) in the corresponding menu:


6. Specify the region you want to perform new testing from.

7. This field is used to specify the purpose of a new check.

Optional Settings (under Optional tab):


8. Specify the port settings. By default, options for a common uptime check are set as follows:

HTTP: 80
HTTPS: 443

9. Enter a username and password for a check to be able to login via Basic Auth. Please note that your new check can use only a simple authentication mechanism like Basic Auth used by some online services to login.

10. This field provides two parameters: a drop down menu where you can select whether the specified string should be found or not. The very strings can be found anywhere in the HTML of your site. Please note that strings check is not case sensitive. If a string is not found, the check is considered down.

11. In this field you can specify the POST data to your URL in order to send a POST request. The header Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded will be sent with the request automatically.
12. This field is optional. It allows you to specify and change headers sent with every single request.

Select a way you want to be notified by opening Incident Alerts or Up/Down Alerts tab.

Under the Incident Alerts tab (13) you can choose the alert policy by checking corresponding radio buttons.


Under the Up/Down Alerts tab (14) you can choose simple alerting procedure specifying contacts to receive an alert message. The way Pingdom should send you those messages you can specify in the Alert via: block.


After you are done with the aforementioned steps, click Create Check button to create a new uptime check for your website or server.

HTTP Custom Check

In opposite to a simple ping, HTTP Custom Check allows to execute custom scripts in order to determine the status of the site as well as get its response time which makes monitoring procedure more comprehensive. Please note that script needs to output XML in the format shown below. Any status other than OK will make the check count as down.


Please also note that response time number needs to be a positive number and is limited to 8 digits in the integer part and 3 in the fractional part, i.e. the maximum value is 99,999,999.999.