Posted by mark on March 15th, 2011
When setting up a new monitor, we monitor by default from all stations that support the selected protocol or monitor type. In most cases that means your site or server is monitored from all our, currently, 56 stations.
Depending on your situation and requirements, this default might be desired, but maybe it is not. Deciding how to pick your monitoring locations is pretty straightforward:
- If you have a global audience we recommend to use the default setting. In that case a random monitoring station is selected for each individual check.
- If you have a global audience and would like to monitor evenly from all locations you will have to change the scheduling algorithm to “sequential”, see below how to do that.
- If you have an audience in multiple countries, but not all, simply make a custom selection of the stations in the countries you are interested in.
- If your visitors come from a single county, simply pick a station from that country, and change the scheduling algorithm to “master”.
So that was no rocket science right? Next: how to actually set that up.
First of all the default setting. Here you specify the setting for all new monitors you create. Simply go to the Account preferences and find the “checkpoint selection”. Select all the stations you want to be used in your monitoring pool. Note that a minimum of three stations is required. The reason is that for some monitoring errors (like time-out’s) we perform a second opinion check from another location than the one that reported an error to prevent false alerts.
Existing monitors will not be affected by the changes you made in the account preferences.
To change individual monitors, go to the Monitor settings and click on a monitor (or create a new one). The “Checkpoint order algorithm” and the “Checkpoint selection” settings can be found in the “Expert mode”.
The “Checkpoint order algorithm” determines how the monitoring scheduler operates. The following settings are possible:
- Random: a random checkpoint is chosen each time this monitor is checked. This is the default.
- Master: the first check is always done from the checkpoint specified by you. If an error occurs, the second-opinion check is performed from a random (other) checkpoint.
- Sequential: all checkpoints are used in a fixed order (round robin)
- Sticky: same as random, but when a checkpoint detects an error, the monitor will be checked only from that location until the error disappears.
Selecting a specific set of stations is done at the “Checkpoint selection”. Simply check the check-box and you’ll find the same view as in the account preferences, enabling you to select the stations you want to participate for this specific monitor.
Please leave a comment if you have questions about this or open a ticket at the helpdesk.
Post by Mark Pors. Mark is CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. His favorite editor is emacs, but he hardly gets to use it nowadays.
‘WatchMouse Weekly’ tweets and corresponding blog posts aims to be an introduction with tips and tricks for getting the most out of your WatchMouse monitoring. For all ‘WatchMouse Weekly’ blog posts go here.
