Unsupported for Cloud Platform Free
Uptime monitoring is not supported for Cloud Platform Free, but you can upgrade to a paid Cloud Platform subscription.
The Cloud Platform uptime monitoring service monitors the uptime and responsiveness of the Drupal application hosted at your active domain for an environment. This service checks your application every minute to see if it is online and serving pages.
Uptime monitoring tests your website by loading a special, secure URL served by the Acquia Connector module. By responding to this monitoring URL, your application demonstrates that Drupal bootstraps correctly, and that all of its basic dependencies are functioning.
The uptime monitoring service also checks other pages on your application (such as your home page) less frequently and tracks their response time. To help minimize false alarms, the uptime monitoring service will only send an alert if the page checks repeatedly return errors.
Uptime monitoring is a self-service feature you can use to monitor trends in response times and availability. It does not notify Acquia Support of application outages or issues. Acquia uses different systems to monitor the health of an application’s servers. If Acquia detects server issues that may impact application availability for a prolonged period of time, Acquia Support will file a proactive ticket. However, not all application issues are caused by server problems, so uptime monitoring will sometimes catch issues that Acquia’s server monitoring does not.
Websites in maintenance mode will not trigger uptime monitoring alerts.
To use the uptime monitoring service, you must also install and enable the Acquia Connector module on your Cloud Platform environment. Acquia recommends that you always use the latest version of the Acquia Connector module. After you update or install the Acquia Connector module, go to the Home > Admin > Reports page of your Drupal website, and then click Status reports. In the Acquia SPI section, click the manually send SPI data link to register the presence of the new module with Acquia Insight. You must wait a few minutes before you can then enable the uptime monitoring service.
Note
For subscribers requiring uptime monitoring for Drupal multisite installations, Acquia recommends leveraging New Relic’s Synthetics service. A Lite license for New Relic Synthetics is included with all Acquia Cloud subscriptions. To upgrade your Synthetics Lite license to include more monthly checks, contact New Relic.
Acquia’s uptime monitoring self-service feature doesn’t support multisite installation monitoring.
Attempting to enable uptime in a multisite installation can cause Cloud Platform to display error messages that uptime is already enabled, especially if you have enabled uptime monitoring for any other application in the multisite installation.
To enable uptime monitoring for an environment, you must have the appropriate Cloud Platform permission, depending on the environment:
By default, users with the Administrator, Team Lead, and Senior Developer roles have these permissions, while users with the Developer role do not.
Cloud Platform Professional subscriptions can enable uptime monitoring on their Production environment only.
While Cloud Platform Enterprise subscriptions can enable uptime monitoring on any environment, Acquia does not recommend you enable uptime monitoring for non-production environments. If you must use this feature, disable it whenever possible. Acquia Support will not troubleshoot historical downtime for non-production environments.
To enable uptime monitoring, complete the following steps:
Sign in to Cloud Platform as a user with the appropriate permissions.
Select your organization, application, and environment and then, in the left menu, click Uptime.
On the Uptime page, click Edit.
On the Edit Uptime settings page, select the Enable uptime monitoring check box.
Click Save.
As an alternative, you can also use the following procedure:
To view information about an environment’s uptime, in the left menu, click Overview. In the Site Health section, the uptime graph displays your application’s responsiveness over time, measured in milliseconds.
The graph displays the environment’s response with bars colored according to the response:
You can use the date menu to change the time period of the data presented in the graph.
Note
Currently, all uptime monitoring requests originate from the AWS US-East region. Servers located outside of the US-East region may see longer response times reported by the uptime monitoring service than those experienced by website visitors who are located closer to your servers.
You can enable email notifications of environment uptime issues. If you do so, the uptime monitoring service will send an email notification after three consecutive minutes of errors. This threshold helps reduce false alarms. You cannot customize the three-minute threshold.
To enable email notifications, complete the following steps:
Uptime monitoring requests originate from the IP address 18.210.189.71
. If
your application uses a custom Varnish configuration, you must whitelist this
IP address in your custom VCL.
The uptime monitoring email notifying you of a possible detected outage will resemble the following example:
Subject: [ERROR] Your application [example.com] may be offline
At [YYYY-MM-DD 12:00] UTC, Acquia’s automated monitoring detected the following errors on [example.com]
The uptime monitoring email notifying you of the possible end of an outage will resemble the following example:
Subject: [RESOLVED] Your application [example.com] may be back online
At [YYYY-MM-DD 12:00] UTC, Acquia’s automated monitoring detected your website at [example.com] is now passing all of Acquia’s uptime checks.
When the uptime service receives an error, a notification of the error is sent and displayed in the Insight notification list. The notification describes the type of error and possible causes. The following categories of errors are reported:
To function, the uptime monitoring service must receive an HTTP 200
response from the following requests:
GET
requesthttps://[site_URL]/system/acquia-connector-status
If the Site Health graph displays errors after you first enable uptime monitoring, the most likely causes are:
If you have questions about an alert and your Acquia subscription entitles you to open support tickets, you can contact Acquia Support. The uptime monitoring service may detect momentary, transient issues on a website, or in the network between our service and a website’s servers. For this reason, Acquia Support will not investigate momentary outages. We will, however, investigate recurring instances of partial or complete downtime detected by this feature, or issues which are currently in progress. Furthermore, Support will not investigate DNS errors, which usually mean either that your DNS provider or registrar (often the same) is having an issue, or that there are networking issues outside of Acquia’s control.