Release Notes

v3.0

November 23, 2016

Advanced Monitors Added

New

 Several new monitors have been created focused on security and performance. These are:

Domain BlocklistWhether your site is on a domain blocklist.
Email BlocklistWhether your email server has been blocklisted.
Google Safe BrowsingChecks if your site has been flagged by the Google Safe Browsing service for hosting malware or being a phishing site.
DNS Expected ValuesMakes sure your DNS values are what you expect them to be.
Open Port ScanChecks if any system ports on a host are open when they should not be.
Botnet/Malicious User DetectionThis monitors suspicious or fraudulent users and alerts you when the user quality score drops below a threshold.
Real User PerformanceMonitors global load times and satisfaction levels from real users.
TCP PortThe TCP Port monitor checks if a server is accepting TCP connection requests on a specific I.P. address port.
PingThe ping monitor simply tests if an I.P. address or host is responding to pings.

Changed

 Several monitoring stations have been added across the globe.

Fixed

 Contact creation was failing on new accounts.
The default 'Websites' dashboard was not restricting the reports to website monitors.
Performance issues were causing some updates to not occur.

Planned

 Release of a public API. This will be for account management and reporting.
More communication methods for contacts.

v2.0

August 5, 2016

HTTPS monitoring added

New

 A new HTTPS monitor type is supported. It monitors for HTTPS uptime, performance and functionality.
Certificates can now be setup to specify how many days before expiration to send alerts. This can be used in conjunction with contact escalations (see below) to create a series of alerts as the expiration date approaches. The prior version defaulted to seven days.
Peformance reporting on HTTPS.
Uptime reporting on HTTPS. You can also set up a test to match expected text on the site to validate the site is operational and not producing error pages or hacked.
A status page that combines certificate and HTTPS data.
User-definable dashboards.
State change reporting. This is when a monitor switches state from up to down or down to up.
The ability to turn off monitoring stations.
The ability to pause monitors.
The ability to run ad-hoc tests from the monitors page.
Contact sets and escalations: Contacts now can be set up to send to multiple sets for email and SMS endpoints. This allows you to create named sets of contacts that can be modified without having to modify each monitor.

Each contact set can be set to wait a certain amount of time prior to sending notifications. This can be used as an escalation process.
Reporting: The log report (and all new reports) now support:
  • Filters
  • Exports to PDF and CSV
  • Customizable columns

Changed

 Contacts are now structured as named sets of endpoints. This significantly departs from the original structure of a simple list of contacts.
When setting up monitors, you now can select multiple contact sets, instead of picking which individual contacts to alert.

Fixed

 False positives: This is a situation where transient errors on the web would cause alerts to be sent out. To prevent this, a confirmation test is performed from another station prior to any alerts being sent out.

This issue has created the need for logging both unconfirmed errors and confirmed errors separately.
On occasion, certificates were showing a status of 'Unknown', when they were actually expired.

Planned

 Release of a public API. This will be for account management and reporting.
More monitor types.
The ability to select cipher sets for certificates.
More communication methods for contacts.