Three Advanced Notification Features that Your Site Uptime Monitoring Vendor MUST Deliver

To say that site uptime vendors deliver notifications is about as insightful as saying that cars have steering wheels, planes have wings, or TikTok videos have cringe. It’s a given.  

But this doesn’t mean that all vendors use the same notification playbook. Some vendors offer basic (read: superficial) notification features, while others offer advanced notification features that include: 

1. Multiple Notification Methods

Within minutes of unresponsive site behavior (and after verification that the issue is not a “false positive”), a designated individual in your organization — such as a sysadmin, network specialist, etc. — should be notified of the problem via email, text and/or automated phone call. The use of multiple notification methods increases the chances of a quick response.  

2. Customizable Notifications

If a detected failure continues, you have the ability to configure your monitor settings to notify even more members of your team, or other departments. This assures you that long-lasting events get all the eyes on them as needed.

3. Comprehensive Site Issue Notification

There is more to site uptime than just availability. In other words: a site may be online and accessible, but certain processes within the site — such as those involving checkout, signing-in, customer portals, etc. — may be malfunctioning. You need to be notified of these issues as well, since they can be just as costly and damaging to your reputation as your entire site going down.

The Bottom Line

Site uptime notification is essentially about one thing: discovering issues BEFORE your customers and visitors, so that you can rapidly target and solve the problem(s). Choosing a vendor that checks both of these boxes is not only a good idea, considering the potential costs and consequences to your revenue and reputation, it is a mandatory move.

AlertBot’s advanced notification feature supports: multiple notification methods (email, text and phone), automatic notification escalation, and comprehensive site issue notification. Discover why leading organizations around the world choose AlertBot. Launch your free trial.  

“We’ve been using AlertBot for over eight years now. We were sick of finding out about problems with our website from end users first. While there are varying levels of complexity to AlertBot monitors, even the simple alerts let us know almost instantly when we have an issue. The prioritization of alerting groups and timing allow us to automatically escalate the notifications if someone is not immediately able to respond.” – Chris C., IT Director 

Read other verified customer reviews here!

A Closer Look at AlertBot’s Alert Group Feature

If we start by sharing that AlertBot’s alert group feature lets you, well, alert certain groups, then you might wonder what earth-shattering revelations we have in store — such as water is wet, fire is hot, and the pain of Game of Throne’s final season will never, ever go away (seriously, whatever happened to Gendry?!).

Yes, you’re right: the alert group feature IS about alerting groups of people about a site failure — but as George R.R. Martin would say: there is much more to the story! Here’s a rundown of some interesting details that you may not be aware of:

Notes

When you set up an alert group, you can add notes if you feel that it would benefit your team. For example, you can let your Web Team know who the communication point person during a failure event should be or if it should include several people from the team, provide updates about vacation schedules, and anything else that you deem relevant.

Notification Order

You can choose when members of an alert group are notified of a site failure, from immediately all the way up to 48 hours later. For example, your Web Team can be alerted right away during a site failure event, and your CTO can be alerted 1 hour later into a site failure event and so on (if the problem persists). You can choose the frequency of alerting and how many times individuals or a group of people can be alerted during downtime events on your site.

Contact Method

You can also choose which email address will be contacted, based on the notification order. For example, an immediate alert can be sent to [email protected] and other teams/emails if selected, and then an hour later another alert can be sent to [email protected] and so on until the site is back up and running.

Monitors

What happens if you’re doing some testing or updating, and you don’t want failure events across all site monitors to trigger an alert (and maybe spark some anxiety)? No problem: you can choose which specific monitors are associated with an alert group.

But don’t worry: if you have a whole bunch of monitors and want to include them all, then you don’t have to manually add each one to an alert group. Simply select “All monitors in the account” and you’re good to go!

Do You Have 30 Seconds?

We’ve saved the best part for last: setting up a new alert group doesn’t take hours, or even minutes — it takes seconds. Simply choose the options you need, and you’re all set. And changing an alert group’s settings is just as fast (maybe even faster).

Try AlertBot Now

Reading is fun. But experiencing is better (unless you happen to be reading Game of Thrones and are perfectly happy learning about White Walkers vs. hanging out with them). Put AlertBot to the test by launching your free trial today. Play around with alert groups, along with many other features and functions.

 There is nothing to download or install, no billing information is required, and you will be 100% setup in minutes. Get started now: click here.

What Exactly is a Website Monitoring “False Alarm”
and Why You Should Care About It

by Louis Kingston

You know what falsehoods are. You know what false teeth are. You may even know some falsehoods about false teeth. But do you know what a website monitoring false alarm (also known as a “false positive”) is? If not, then please keep reading to find out — because it’s a very big deal.

What is a False Alarm?

Remember back in grade school, when the fire bell suddenly went off in class and you were instructed to exit the class single-file and march outside? As you rose from your desk, heart racing, you wondered if you’d ever see your Trapper Keeper, Real Ghostbusters lunchbox and JanSport backpack ever again. But after you and your classmates were wrangled into the parking lot to stand in the brisk autumn air for what felt like an eternity, you soon learn it was just some older kid who thought it’d be funny to pull that shiny red lever on the hallway wall.

Well, that’s essentially what a false alarm is: a result that incorrectly indicates that a particular condition or attribute is present (i.e. it wasn’t a real fire consuming your place of education; it was merely a “false alarm” thanks to that jerk in the grade above yours).

What is a Website Monitoring False Alarm?

What you need and expect from a website monitoring tool is to know precisely when your website goes down. Why? Because research has found that the average cost of site downtime is $5,600 per minute. And remember, we are just talking about the average cost here. Some site downtime fiascos are much more costly. Just ask Amazon, which lost an estimated $99 million after going down for 63 minutes during Prime week in 2018. Granted, most businesses (including yours, unless you happen to be Jeff Bezos) won’t have to shell out $1.65 million a minute due to website downtime, but the basic point should be clear: site downtime is costly, and false alarms are supposed to minimize this financial damage.

But what happens when a website monitoring downtime alarm goes off, but nothing is actually wrong? It gets chalked up to a false alarm.

Why Website Monitoring False Alarms Are So Common

Many website monitoring tools — and virtually all of the free kind — have a test server in one location. If that test server detects that a website is not available, it does the only thing it can: sound the alarm. And that seems to be the correct thing to do, right? Well, not exactly.

Let’s say that that the website in this example is only down for a few seconds due to an isolated power outage. The test server has no way of knowing this (i.e. that the website is back up). And so, it is going to generate a false alarm.

The Solution: Multiple Testing Server Locations

Now, imagine that there are multiple test servers spread out across the country — say, one in New York and one in Los Angeles. The test server in New York detects that a website has gone down, and triggers a red alert (this test server is a big Star Trek fan). But it doesn’t sound the alarm. Instead, 60 seconds later the test server in Los Angeles checks in. If the website is up, then it cancels the red alert. If the website is down, then it confirms the initial diagnosis by the test server in New York, and the alarm goes off.

The AlertBot Advantage

At AlertBot, we hate false alarms even more than our customers. That’s why unlike many other website monitoring tools — and again, virtually all of the free ones — we have test servers located across the U.S. and worldwide. We don’t guess whether our customer’s website is down. We know.

Plus, when it is necessary to send out an alert, our system automatically and immediately contacts key people — such as network administrators, SysAdmins, CIOs, etc. — through email, SMS/text message, or phone (or any combination).

What’s more, our test servers keep checking for website site availability, and provide an update (again, in the preferred method) if it goes back up. We also highlight the amount of time that the website — or a specific portion/page of the website — was down. Our customers use this information to keep an eye on overall website performance, proactively detect problems, and ensure that their web host is consistently meeting uptime standards.

Ready to bid false alarms a true farewell? Then start a FREE TRIAL of AlertBot now. There’s no billing information required, no installation, and you’ll be setup within minutes. Click here.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and their German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.