New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Do you find out the reason for downtime?
Hello, my LEB was down several times for about an hour and a few minutes on other occasions in the last 10 hours according to Pingdom. So I woke up and realized my machine rebooted too. It's been up for ~20days both network/machine so I am thinking if I should file a ticket to ask what happened. I understand downtime happens but wonder if it's necessary to know what happened. Would you?
Comments
I usually ask why there was downtime, yes. I don't particularly care if the reason is "Someone else on the node was getting DDoS'd" or "Our tech fat fingered a command"... just be honest with me about the reason.
But not down at all using reputable monitoring software....
Communication is key. If there's downtime affecting multiple VPSs then the provider should be contacting you instead of you contacting them.
Yep. I think most providers just count on their customers not noticing or not caring enough to send in a ticket. Even on a $15/yr VPS, you should get at least a brief announcement on a status page or something like that.
Is this right expectation to have even for a LEB? Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to see what's the general consensus regarding downtime and accountability with LEBs. I'm new to LEB so I thought I ask.
Are LEB providers supposed to inform the clients when there's a reboot (scheduled or unscheduled), or when there is any network downtime?
Ah, I'm using it for personal websites so I don't know if there's any reputable monitoring software that's free? Advise please?
So you will drop them a support ticket to get to the bottom of any downtime? Even if it's 5minutes or if the server rebooted?
i find pingdom sometimes reports false downtime, several times it has reported downtime, but immediately check my site and it's up. But if you got a reboot, i'd submit a ticket and ask
A single reboot I don't really mind. If the server is being rebooted several times a short time span, yeah, I'll ask about that. I usually don't bother to ask about short downtimes (<10 minutes) either, unless they're happening more than occasionally. Anything longer than 10 minutes, I send in a ticket.
I know I'm a broken record on this one, Nagios
This is one of the main reasons why we don't have an uptime guarantee. Our SLA (although we don't call it that. It's part of our ToS.) states that we'll do the best we can with our servers and network and then we explain why uptime percentages are pretty much worthless as well as all the exceptions most providers have.
I'd drop them a note and ask about it. Start it off with a "just curious..." For all you know, you and your account may have been the cause of the reboot or the downtime. Would be nice to know, right?
Having said all that, it would have been nice if your provider had notified it's clients as to the reboot as well as the cause. One of the reasons why some providers have blogs and twitter accounts and facebook and the like. If they're not doing such, that's a concern. Communication as noted up above.
@miTgiB, as i read that site, it's the software for doing monitoring, right? Not actually a service?
yeah i had pingdom false downtime alerts eat up nearly all my sms credits, so i have sms alerts disabled for now LOL
It's always the question of who is watching the watchmen.
@kylix moaned "It's always the question of who is watching the watchmen."
Their moms.
Yes, and I am shocked you are not already using it, it has been around since the mid 90's. I though all us old timers used it, it's the youngin's that have this need to reinvent the wheel.
Nagios is great but it's not exactly the easiest software to learn. In fact I've read from numerous companies that the "free" software cost them thousands of dollars in billable hours between training and configuring. That being said, once you take the time to learn it you'll have a very powerful tool to work with.
Personally I liked Zabbix more in terms of setup and learning curve. Then again, I still found Zabbix to be confusing so when my choices were between Nagios and Zabbix I decided to just write my own monitoring software... it really ended up being the easiest path (and this coming from a non-programmer).
You should set up something so it records the incoming and outgoing IPs over 30mbps. that way you can keep a record and send abuse report if needed
!
Is 30Mbps abusive?
@miTgiB We have something java based provided by the tech support company I outsource it.
It's one of the reasons why I had such a problem without a laptop. The library's computers are a few versions behind on their java and I'm locked out on using it.
Who cares about "others". Are you smart or a dolt? Companies are full of dolts, 1-5 man shops are usually filled with very smart people. I now use Centreon as a front end for nagios since it offers the ability to cluster nagios. It also makes setup a breeze, but it already is easy enough.
I like to consider myself smart but, as I stated, it confused the hell out of me and I wasn't ready to invest time into reading a book to figure out how to monitor a server when it took me less time to code and implement my own monitoring software from scratch. So I'm smart enough to code my own software but not for using Nagios I guess.
I must be imagining all those support companies that make millions supporting microsoft products.
Not trying to argue. I just hated that quote as it's been around for decades. All software requires support, whatever the source or licensing.
I'm merely stating that Nagios may be free and it may be the industry leading, but it's not a simple solution by any means. For what it's worth, every company I've read that same statement from has been a hosting company if that's any indication.
Very true and most companies would be bankrupt without it.