Monitoring

BitFolk provides a free monitoring service which can be enabled on request, and is required for some of BitFolk's other services.

Web interface

The monitoring web interface is at https://mon.bitfolk.com/. You log in to it using your usual BitFolk credentials, and it should show every configured check against all VPSes that you have with BitFolk.

If for whatever reason you do not wish to use your normal BitFolk credentials for this, it is possible for BitFolk to set up some different credentials for you to use. Please contact Support about this.

Setup

Monitoring checks are free but are not added by default. This might change in the future but for now you have to ask Support for them to be added.

Usually just an IPv4 ping check will be added, which will suffice for checking that your VPS is up. Almost any service that you run can be monitored though, and common requests include:

• IPv6 ping
• SSH
• HTTP / HTTPS (including TLS certificate validity)
• SMTP
• MySQL

These sorts of checks can work without an agent (i.e. without anything installed on your VPS). More complicated checks such as disk space, load or anything else that you can check with a script will need some sort of agent such as an NRPE daemon or SNMP daemon.

Alerts

Your first interaction with BitFolk's monitoring will probably be when you receive an email alert. There are two kinds of alerts: Host and Service. Host alerts happen when the host check fails; this is usually an IPv4 and IPv6 ping against your VPS. The other checks are for individual services on your VPS.

Host alerts will repeat every hour unless they recover on their own. Service alerts will repeat every 4 hours unless they recover on their own.

Stopping the flow of alerts

If you intend to fix the root cause of the alert, but not just now, you should go to the web interface and acknowledge the problem. This will prevent more alerts being sent until the state of the host or service changes. There is a handy link in the alert email itself that sends you to the right place.

If the check is no longer relevant to you, or if its thresholds need tweaking, please contact Support to ask for it to be removed or adjusted.

Controlling where alerts go to

In the Contacts section of BitFolk's web Panel you can add additional contact records, and then assign them to the "Alerting" role. When you do this, these will be the only email addresses that receive alerts from BitFolk's monitoring. If you do not make use of the "Alerting" role then the email address in your main customer record will be used. You can add multiple contacts to the "Alerting" role and they will all receive the alerts. The monitoring configuration will update within 5 minutes of you making a change here.

Monitoring required for BitFolk services

Certain services that BitFolk provides require monitoring to be set up because they rely on something on your VPS, and BitFolk wants to know that is working when diagnosing any problem with the service. So far this includes:

• Backups

This service works by SSH, so an SSH check will be added. Also the disk space used by your backups and the age of the last successful backup will be monitored. See the dedicated article on the backups service for more information.

• Secondary DNS

This services requires that your primary DNS server is correctly serving your DNS zone(s). Convenience monitoring of each of your zones on each of BitFolk's authoritative DNS servers is also added. See the dedicated article on the secondary DNS service for more information.

In addition, if you opt in to suspend and restore then at least a basic ping check will be added so that BitFolk has some confidence that your VPS has been successfully restored.

Frequently Anticipated Questions

Why do I have a http-v4- and http-v6- check for every web site?

This is to provide separate checks for HTTP over IPv4 and IPv6 when your VPS has both address families configured. Otherwise your web site being reachable over either protocol would provide a success and you might miss breaking it on one of the protocols.

Why do I have some HTTP checks that are just against an IP address?

In the old system some customers had a simple HTTP check which would have been using the main IPv4 address as a vhost. Therefore the new checks are doing exactly the same thing. It would be better to specify a vhost and a URL path if applicable. Please contact [[Support] to do so.

Why don't I have different host objects for IPv4 and IPv6 like I did with Nagios?

It's much easier with the new system (Icinga) to have both IPv4 and IPv6 on the same host object.

Why don't I have a ping6 check?

Your monitoring setup has been copied over from the old system. Many customers only had ping4 checks even when they had working IPv6 (all BitFolk customers have IPv6, but not all of them use it!). If you'd like a ping6 check added, please contact Support.

Does the https check have to verify the certificate?

By default BitFolk's https checks do verify that your certificate is not expired, but it is possible for BitFolk to amend the checks to not care about this if for some reason you do not intend to renew it.

Can you alert me by some other means than email?

Possibly. Please contact Support to discuss your needs. One customer does have Pushover notifications set up.

Also bear in mind that anything which can turn emails into another kind of alert can be used by adding them as a contact in the Alerting role. There are several customers who have alerts sent to an email-to-SMS gateway service that they have provided themselves.