Monitoring uptime for your application¶

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 infrastructure. If Acquia detects infrastructure 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 infrastructure problems, so uptime monitoring will sometimes catch issues that Acquia’s infrastructure monitoring does not.

Websites in maintenance mode does not trigger uptime monitoring alerts.

Before you begin¶

To use the uptime monitoring service, you must 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 select Status reports. In the Acquia SPI section, select the manually send SPI data link to register the presence of the new module with Acquia Insight. You must wait for a few minutes before enabling the uptime monitoring service.

Learn more about enabling uptime monitoring on Cloud Platform by visiting the Acquia Academy (sign-in required) for the video tutorial on Enabling Uptime Monitoring on Cloud Platform.

Uptime monitoring and multisite installations¶

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.

Roles and permissions for uptime monitoring¶

To enable uptime monitoring for an environment, you must have the appropriate Cloud Platform permission, depending on the environment:

Add or remove domains for non-production environments
Add or remove domains for the production environment

By default, users with the Administrator, Team Lead, and Senior Developer roles have these permissions, while users with the Developer role do not.

Enabling uptime monitoring¶

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:

Sign in to the Cloud Platform user interface as a user with the appropriate permissions.
Select your organization, application, and environment.
Go to Configuration > Uptime.
Select the Enable uptime monitoring check box.
Select Save.

Viewing the uptime graph¶

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.

Uptime graph

The graph displays the environment’s response with bars colored according to the response:

OK: Normal response
Impaired: The DNS record failed to resolve, or every request timed out
Error: The environment returned HTTP 4xx or 5xx status codes for all requests

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. Infrastructure 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 infrastructure.

Receiving email notifications¶

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:

On the Uptime Settings page, select Enable alerts.
Enter one or more comma-separated email addresses where you want to send uptime alerts, and select Save.

Allowlisting uptime monitoring¶

Uptime monitoring requests originate from the IP address 18.210.189.71. If your application uses a custom Varnish configuration, you must allowlist this IP address in your custom VCL.

Examples of email notifications¶

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.

Getting more information about errors¶

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:

Site down. Here are some possible causes:
- New code was deployed which may contain an error in the PHP that requires a code rollback. Check your PHP error logs for any fatal errors.
- A new module was enabled and it has created an error condition on the website. Disable the module.
- Caches were recently cleared and the website is hitting a memory limit when attempting to rebuild the cache.
Site impaired. The website is returning errors for some, but not all, of the pages Acquia monitors. If any of the 4 requests take more than five seconds to complete, Uptime Monitoring will display this status temporarily.
Site online. The website has come back online.
Site in Maintenance mode. The website reports it is in Drupal maintenance mode.
Site health monitoring configuration error. The website is not responding to testing. Ensure the Acquia Connector is enabled, the module version is 8.x-1.4, 7.x-2.13, or later, and the website is connected to Acquia Insight.
Site not responding. This could be due to general internet connectivity issues, or the infrastructure hosting the website may be offline. If your website is hosted with Acquia and the infrastructure powering it are down, we will be opening a support ticket with you shortly.
Site DNS error. The DNS record for the website is failing to resolve, meaning we did not receive a timely response during a DNS lookup. This usually means either your DNS provider or registrar is having an issue, or there are networking issues outside of Acquia’s control. DNS resolution problems frequently resolve within minutes. If you can load the domain, the issue may be localized or already resolved. Acquia cannot investigate DNS errors.
Zero (0): This occurs due to issues with the SSL certificate on the site, either on Acquia Cloud Platform or on your CDN or WAF. To verify if your SSL certificates are valid, see SSL on Acquia Cloud.

Troubleshooting¶

To function, the uptime monitoring service must receive an HTTP 200 response from the following requests:

Your homepage, as a GET request
The monitoring URL https://[site_URL]/system/acquia-connector-status

If the Site Health graph displays errors after you first enable uptime monitoring, the most likely causes are:

The Acquia Connector module on your environment is not up-to-date.
Acquia Insight has not yet received confirmation from your environment that the Acquia Connector module has been updated. Check the last connection date and time displayed under Connection history on the environment’s Insight page. Run cron, if it has not run recently.
The uptime monitoring service cannot reach either the monitoring URL or your homepage because the attempts are being redirected more than 10 times or blocked. This situation can occur if the monitoring URL is password-protected or is affected by redirect rules, or if query strings are being stripped.
One or more of the requests takes more than five seconds to complete. Contact Acquia support for assistance profiling your application to help identify the cause of the slow responses.

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 infrastructure. For this reason, Acquia Support will not investigate momentary outages. We will, however, investigate recurring cases 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.

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