At Deltablue, we are constantly striving to improve the experience of our users. As part of this ongoing effort, we are excited to announce the availability of our latest feature, the Availability Monitor.
The Availability Monitor is a free feature that gives users an overview of the availability status of all their applications within the Deltablue cloud platform. This feature aims to improve the lives of operational teams at digital agencies and integrators by simplifying the process of diagnosing operational issues.
With the Availability Monitor, platform users can quickly and easily identify the origin of operational issues, enabling them to resolve the problem with minimal impact. The information provided includes DNS info, SSL certificate validity, and HTTP responses, among others.
In addition, the Availability Monitor can simultaneously monitor the status of your applications in several regions. This feature is especially useful for users with a global customer base, as it ensures that their applications are available to customers around the world.
The Availability Monitor is enabled by default for all URLs within the Deltablue cloud platform. This means that our users can benefit from this new feature without any additional configuration, setup, or cost.
The challenge
In the project business, you build applications for many customers, and your portfolio steadily increases. Your clients expect you to monitor things to ensure everything runs smoothly. Even after development has finished customers expect their applications to run well, and they often fall back on you for help when something goes wrong. Downtime can happen, or a certificate can expire. Even when things are running smoothly, sudden spikes in activity might strain the available resources to the point of failure.
This might be manageable when you’re maintaining a single project, but it quickly becomes a challenge for growing businesses. When your customer portfolio grows, so does the need for tools to manage applications at a larger scale.
At DeltaBlue, we focus on making your life easier and more efficient. That’s why we are happy to introduce our latest product feature: the Availability Monitor.
What is the Availability Monitor and how does it work?
The Availability Monitor is a DeltaBlue platform feature that keeps an eye on the availability of your application from a user point of view. It monitors several technical aspects, which we have detailed below. It provides a centralized view of all your projects. It can send alerts and be snoozed if needed. You can quickly navigate to your application from the status page which you find in the top navigation bar under Overview -> Status.
The checks
DNS
Regular checks are performed to validate the DNS configuration. If there appears to be a DNS issue, it will be flagged.
Pro tip: You can always retrieve the correct DNS settings and instructions in the DeltaBlue platform under “Application details”.
Content
Content checks are performed to validate the request’s response to the specific URL. This is useful when you implement a “health” check endpoint in your web application and you want to get notified if a functional problem occurs. For example, the health check endpoint can validate connectivity to the database or an external API and returns the message “OK” if everything appears to be working. The Availability Monitor will throw an alert when the message “OK” is not found in the response body.
Pro tip: If a health check endpoint should fail, return an HTTP 500 error code. This will always trigger an alert in the Availablity Monitor.
SSL
Modern websites and API endpoints are typically protected with SSL (HTTPS). This is configured using certificates. Certificates have a limited lifetime and usually have to be renewed yearly. The DeltaBlue.Cloud platform will inform you in advance at regular intervals when your certificates will expire, so you have plenty of time to renew them. If they are not renewed in time and expire, the Availability Monitor will trigger an alert when the certificate expires.
Pro tip: The DeltaBlue platform has built-in Let’s Encrypt functionality. You can enable Let’s Encrypt on any URL that points to the DeltaBlue.Cloud platform. Once enabled, the certificates will be auto-renewed, so you never have to think about it again.
HTTP Response code
When a request is performed to an HTTP endpoint like an API or webpage, the server will respond with an HTTP status code. Based on the HTTP status code, the Availability Monitor can validate the response and determine whether there is an issue. You can find more information about the HTTP status codes here.
Pro tip: You can set a custom HTTP code in your application’s response to indicate a problem and trigger an alert in the Availability Monitor!
Global availability
The Availability Monitor performs checks from different regions worldwide and can report issues per region. These regions include Europe, Asia, the US, and China. Monitoring your websites from multiple regions ensures the availability of your website to users worldwide.
Conclusion
At DeltaBlue, our primary goal is providing our users with the right tools to optimize their day-to-day work. We want to help you maximize your efficiency and reduce unnecessary costs. We care about Quality of Life, ease of use and zero configuration.
We believe that the Availability Monitor is a valuable addition to the Deltablue platform, helping users maintain operational excellence and ensure that their applications are always running smoothly.
- Do not worry about setting up monitoring and alerting. It has already been done for you automatically for every URL you add.
- Keep your operations under control by letting DeltaBlue do the heavy lifting. This improves your operational efficiency and reduces your workload.
- No investment in third-party services is required for monitoring your website. This provides significant financial savings, especially when your portfolio keeps on growing.
Get some insights for free on how your application performs in different regions of the world. We’ll talk more about this in our next blog post, but here is a preview.
We are committed to providing the best possible experience for our users, and the Availability Monitor is just one example of this commitment. We will continue to work hard to improve our platform and deliver new features that meet the needs of our users.
Thank you for choosing Deltablue. We hope you enjoy using the Availability Monitor as much as we enjoyed creating it. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
