Monitoring uptime for your application¶

Before you begin¶

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.

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, complete the following steps:

1. Sign in to Cloud Platform as a user with the appropriate permissions.

2. Select your organization, application, and environment and then, in the left menu, click Uptime.

   

3. On the Uptime page, click Edit.

4. On the Edit Uptime settings page, select the Enable uptime monitoring check box.

   

5. Click Save.

As an alternative, you can also use the following procedure:

1. Sign in to Cloud Platform as a user with the appropriate permissions.
2. In the Uptime monitoring section for the environment you want to monitor, click Enable Uptime.
3. On the Uptime page, click Edit.
4. On the Edit Uptime settings page, select the Enable uptime monitoring check box.
5. Click 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.

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.

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, complete the following steps:

1. On the Uptime page, select Enable alerts.
2. Enter one or more email addresses, separated by commas, to which uptime alerts should be sent, and then click Update settings.

Whitelisting uptime monitoring¶

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.

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 servers hosting the website may be offline. If your website is hosted with Acquia and the servers 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.

Troubleshooting¶

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

1. Your homepage, as a GET request
2. 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 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.