Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Tips & Tricks”
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How to monitor your domain Registrar Lock status with AppBeat?
A domain in “Registrar Lock” status means the registrar for that domain has locked the domain to prevent any unauthorized domain transfers / changes.
Our domain monitor can check domain expirations but did you now you can also check domain locks?
In AppBeat “Check” wizard, go to last step “Health status rules” and modify your Warning rule into something like this:
[trigger_rule: domain expires soon] %EXPIRES_IN_DAYS% <= 30 [trigger_rule: domain not locked!
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Sending monitoring notifications to your PagerDuty
Here are short instructions how to integrate your AppBeat Monitoring with PagerDuty.
Login to your PagerDuty account and create or select existing service
Click on “Integrations” tab and click “New Integration” button:
Enter your integration name, select “Use our API directly” with option “Events API v2” and click “Add Integration” button: 4. Now you should see your new integration with generated “Integration Key” (you will later use this key in AppBeat).
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Our Slack app is now approved!
We are very happy to announce that Slack team approved our app so you can easily integrate it with AppBeat monitoring: install AppBeat to your Slack workspace
For more detailed instructions on how to send monitoring notifications directly to your Slack channel, please read our step by step tutorial.
Happy monitoring!
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How to periodically check page integrity?
Today we published new monitoring engine which supports page integrity checks with SHA-256 hash.
To enable this feature simply add or edit your periodic check and update your warning or error status rule with this snippet:
[trigger_rule: my note: failed page integrity] NOT(MATCH(%RESPONSE_SHA256%, “YOUR_SHA256_VALUE")) –trigger warning if hash does not match
where you should replace YOUR_SHA256_VALUE with actual SHA-256 value for your page. This value can be obtained by running live test as shown below:
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How to add 'unlimited' SMS support?
Your monthly monitoring plan includes predefined number of monthly SMS messages which are used to notify you about outages.
For some users this number may be low and for this reason we decided to write short tutorial how to add your own SMS provider which is limited only by available credit on your account.
In this tutorial we will describe how to integrate with Nexmo but similar method could be applied for other SMS providers.
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Monitoring DNS records for your domain
Want to periodically monitor DNS records for your website? Here are step by step instructions how to accomplish this with AppBeat:
click on “Add new periodic monitor” button and select DNS agent type enter domain you want to monitor you can create custom regular expression rules which will be used for DNS response validation optionally you can test your rules to ensure they are returning status “Good” click “Finish” button Your DNS entries will now be periodically monitored from our agents all around world - you will receive notification if anomaly is detected.
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Domain expiry monitoring with Whois
With newest version of AppBeat you can now periodically run Whois for your domain:
You can customize notification rules to receive message when domain is about to expire or set custom regular expression for Whois response:
For example, you can set regular expression to ensure correct name servers, registrant name, domain status, or any other information returned from Whois server.
Please let us know if you have any questions about this feature.
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Detailed web server certificate validation
We published small update, where you can now enable detailed certificate validation which checks for name mismatch, chain validation errors and other common issues.
You can enable this feature by adding new server certificate check or editing existing one:
Happy monitoring!
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How to get notification before SSL certificate expires?
Login to your AppBeat account (or create new one if you don’t have it yet).
Click “Add new periodic monitor” and select “SSL Certificate” as shown on screenshot below:
Click “Next” button and enter your URL:
Click “Next” and close wizard with “Finish”.
Your certificate will now be periodically monitored and when it is about to expire (30 days or less - you can change this in check settings), you will automatically receive notification (we support email, SMS, Slack, web hooks, …).
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Want less monitoring alarms? Introducing quiet hours!
In newest AppBeat version 1.7.0 you can now define quiet hours for your users, services and/or third-party integrations (I will refer to these as “resources”).
Quiet hours are recurring time periods during which alerts (outgoing notifications) are muted for selected resource(s). Quiet hours does not affect monitoring, just notifications. This means that you will always be able to check log entries, even during effective quiet hours.
You can access this new feature from “Alerting” module and by clicking “Quiet hours” tab as shown below:
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Receive monitoring alerts to your Workplace by Facebook
Today we published new application version with native support for Facebook Workplace.
How to enable it? Please login to your Facebook Workplace account with administrative rights.
Click on Dashboard / Integrations and click “Create App” button. Enter “App Name” (it can be AppBeat or something similar) and set minimum App Permissions to: “Read content” (needed to read group id) and “Post to groups” (needed to post alert).
Now go to AppBeat and click “Alerting” from left menu.
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How to create status page for your app or website using your domain
AppBeat website monitoring allowed you to easily create public status page for a long time. This page is hosted on our domain by using URL in following format: https://appbeat.io/status/YOUR_STATUS_PAGE_ID
However some users wanted more:
hosting public status page on their own domain use their own CSS styling We are happy to announce that newest AppBeat allows you all that!
Method 1: creating public status page on your domain by using simple static HTML template and JavaScript If you navigate to “AppBeat / Public status / Dashboard” you will be able to enable your status page from there and publish on your web server static HTML file, similar to this:
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How to build .NET Microservices
We would like to share with you very interesting NDC Conference session from Sydney which describes pros and cons of a microservices solution and how you can build one using .NET and a number of open source tools like EventStore, RabbitMq and Redis.
Presentation was done by Richard Banks and you can watch it on YouTube:
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C# method for very fast and efficient traceroute (network diagnostic tool)
We like C#, .NET and .NET Core!
Last time we played a little bit with traceroute utility and thought, could we write something fast, efficient, and since we love Asynchronous Programming with async and await (C#), something that would include this pattern as well?
Here is what we came up with :)
using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Diagnostics.Contracts; using System.IO; using System.Net.NetworkInformation; using System.Text; using System.Threading.Tasks;
namespace AppBeat.Core.Utility { public class TraceRoute { private const string DATA = “AppBeat Monitoring - https://appbeat.
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Better website monitoring experience for your team
We deployed our upgraded rule engine. You can now have more descriptive notifications for Warning and Error rules, by combining them together with custom note:
[trigger_rule: my notification message: why so slow???] %RESPONSE_TIME% > 10000
[trigger_rule: server X needs restart???] %STATUS% = 503 AND MATCH(%RESPONSE%, “YOUR_REGULAR_EXPRESSION”)
If conditions for trigger are met, you will automatically receive notification with your note. This may be useful in critical situtations for your team, so they can respond more quickly!
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Coming soon: multi expression rules for better monitoring experience
Very soon we will add multi expression support for Warning and Error notification rules. Syntax will be as following:
[trigger_rule: YOUR_RULE_NAME_1] EXPRESSION(S)_1
[trigger_rule: YOUR_RULE_NAME_2] EXPRESSION(S)_2
[trigger_rule: YOUR_RULE_NAME_N] EXPRESSION(S)_N
On user interface this will look something like this:
This example rule then triggers “Warning” notification which is sent to you and it is also visible in monitor log:
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How to integrate AppBeat website monitor with PagerDuty?
Please follow this simple integration guide: https://www.pagerduty.com/docs/guides/appbeat-integration-guide/
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How to periodically run SSH commands and trigger AppBeat alert
In AppBeat 1.4.5 we introduced support for running SSH commands where you can trigger monitoring alert by checking result of:
command exit status code (for example you can simply trigger error if exit status code is not 0) checking specific text in standard output (stdout) by running regex expression checking specific text in standard error (stderr) by running regex expression You can add new SSH monitor by clicking “Add new periodic monitor”, enter monitor name and from “Agent type” select “Run Secure Shell (SSH) command”:
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How to detect if Azure SQL database is in primary or secondary role?
If you want to have highly available Azure SQL Database it is highly recommended that you configure Active Geo-Replication (this feature is available for all databases in all service tiers).
Active Geo-Replication consists of two (or more) databases in different regions, where one database is primary (read + write operations) and all other databases are secondaries (allowed only read operations). Secondary databases are automatically synced with changes in your primary database.
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How to send service outage alerts to your Slack channel?
Want to integrate your website monitoring notifications with Slack? Please follow these instructions.
Step 1 From AppBeat dashboard, click on Account in the left navigation and then choose Integrations from tab menu.
Step 2 Press the Slack button which opens Add notification channel dialog. Enter arbitrary name for this channel and your Slack webhook URL.
To make sure that everything works please click Test button which should send test notification to your Slack channel.
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Backup web client for high availability
Some of our users are constantly using our “Live status” page by their monitoring teams. Primarily for this reason we are introducing secondary backup web client which can be used to monitor “Live status” page even if there is issue or outage of primary web client. Backup web client is actively running on different datacenter and can be accessed by navigating to web2.appbeat.io (this is also displayed in application footer).
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Embed service status to your dashboard
Today we published new version of AppBeat (1.3.4) which allows users to enable embeddable status images for each service. You can access this feature from “Public status / Embed Status”:
Images are periodically updated with latest statuses by following rules:
if there is no status change for your service then image is refreshed every 5 minutes if service status changes (from good to error, from warning to good, etc.) then we try to upload new status image as soon as possible (this is usually less than 30 seconds after you received your notification) Status images can be embedded to your internal dashboards or internet facing websites.
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AppBeat web app can now run on Linux!
We have successfully migrated our web application from .NET Core RC1 to .NET Core RC2 and published it on test Linux instance (CentOS). Best of all: AppBeat binaries are 100% identical to those on Windows (same cross platform codebase!) and were simply copied to Linux… And it works! It works great!
Here are some setup details for those who are interested.
First, you have to install .NET Core runtime by following simple instructions on Microsoft .
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Monitor websites with ease
If your technical support is using AppBeat Live status screen to monitor current performance and availability of your systems, we have new useful feature for you.
You can now enable sound alarm which is automatically triggered when “Live status” icon turns red. This additionally minimizes chance for missed alarms (other notifications, such as Slack, PagerDuty, email, SMS are of course also dispatched as configured).
You can enable / disable this feature by clicking bell icon as shown below:
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Integration with PagerDuty - The Incident Resolution Platform
Today we published AppBeat 1.3.0 which implements support for third-party notification providers (from Account / Integrations). We are also happy to announce that first provider to be implemented in AppBeat is PagerDuty (available to all users, even those on Free Plan).
You can add PagerDuty to your AppBeat account by following these easy steps:
click “Account / Integrations”: click on “PagerDuty” button to add new notification channel (you can add multiple PagerDuty notification types; ServiceKey can be obtained on your PagerDuty website): once you have tested and added your PagerDuty notification please click on “Services & Checks”.
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Tips & Tricks: bulk importing your website monitors
Few customers who previously used competitive solution asked us if we can help them migrate their web site monitors to AppBeat. We helped them of course and in this process we also created internal tool which speeds up this migration.
If you have too many websites to import them manually, please just contact us and we will gladly assist you. Why bother with manual work if we can do it automatically!
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Schedule new probe
If you have less frequent monitoring and you want to check if your website or service still has errors (and you can’t wait until next scheduled run), you can click on “schedule new probe” link as shown below:
This will add your monitoring request to scheduler que, and it will be automatically retested as soon as possible (usually this is in less than 10 seconds, but please note that page auto refreshes every 60 seconds - you may also manually refresh page for quicker result).
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Ensuring that correct production version of website is deployed
It is common for web developers to have local “debug” version of website and production version.
For example, in debug version you may have uncompressed, full version of JavaScript files for easier debugging and diagnostics, while in production environment you often deploy smaller and thus faster versions of same files.
To automatically detect situation where you mistakenly published debug version into production environment, you can use free AppBeat account to monitor your web page and alert you of such mistakes.