Uptime Monitoring

Maintaining availability is crucial in most cases, when your service goes down you want to be notified and handle accordingly. It is also good to know how reliable your service is by tracking previous downtimes. That way you can use data to tell that your efforts to reduce downtime are effective.
Latency is also an important metric to track as it can notify you when your service slows down.

Vigilant's uptime monitor sends a request to your service from multiple locations at a set interval. This monitor will notify you when:

• Your service becomes unreachable

• Your service is reachable again

• The latency of your service changes

Vigilant will also calculate your uptime percentage for the past 7 days and the past month.
To do this it tracks previous downtimes which can be used to determine the reliability of your service.

Vigilant will choose the closest location to your service and will use this for most of the requests. Occasionally it will send requests from other locations to track latency across the world.
When downtime is detected at one location, Vigilant automatically verifies two additional locations to eliminate false positives.

Setting up an uptime monitor

There are two ways of setting up uptime monitoring in Vigilant. You can enable uptime monitoring for a site by selecting your site and enabling it under the Uptime tab. This will create an HTTP monitor by default that is linked to your site.

It is also possible to create individual monitors which are not linked to a site by using the Add button on the Uptime page.

Linking multiple uptime monitors to a single site is currently not supported.

Monitor Types

Depending on your service you may choose monitor type you need. This determines what type of request is sent to your service.

What type should I choose?

This depends on what you want to monitor, if you want to monitor a website use HTTP.
But if you want to monitor another service such as SFTP you can use ping. With the ping type it is possible to enter a specific port.

HTTP Monitor

The HTTP monitor will also report a service as unavailable on error status codes. Only HTTP status code 200 is seen as available.

Settings

Interval
This determines how often Vigilant will send a request to your service to see if it is up.

Retries
Vigilant can retry the request if it fails, for example if you set this to three Vigilant will send up to three requests if a request fails. Request one and two can fail but if the third request is successful it will not mark that service as down.

Timeout
This is the amount of seconds that Vigilant waits for a response from your service.

Whitelisting Vigilant

Vigilant uses multiple locations to monitor your service, the IPs it uses can change. Vigilant provides an endpoint which you can retrieve the current IP addresses from that Vigilant uses for uptime and latency checks in text and json formats:

• https://app.govigilant.io/api/v1/uptime/ips/json

• https://app.govigilant.io/api/v1/uptime/ips/text

You may use these to automate the creation of a whitelist. Please limit the amount of requests to these endpoints and respect the ratelimit of 10 requests per minute.