Currently there are a large number of solutions to monitor physical servers, cloud servers, web servers, FTP, SSH and even the state of the databases of a certain system. UptimeRobot is a free tool and very easy to use, which runs directly on the company’s servers, and which will help us to monitor our Internet connection for free to check if it goes down, and we will even be able to monitor different services such as SSH, FTP, web and much more . Do you want to know all the features of this tool and how to use it to monitor your Internet connection?
What is UptimeRobot and what is it for?
UptimeRobot is a very basic but very useful monitoring system, because we do not have to install any server ourselves to start monitoring our services, everything will be done directly by the tool itself from its servers. Thanks to this, we will not have to pay for a VPS server or install a monitoring system like the popular Nagios, Icinga2, Zabbix and even Prometheus ourselves.
This tool has a completely free version that will allow us to create and configure a maximum of 50 monitors, this monitoring is checked every 5 minutes. In case you need more monitors and the monitoring is done every minute, you must buy the paid subscription.
UptimeRobot is capable of monitoring Internet connections and services on different servers, we will only have to indicate the public IP address, domain or dynamic DNS, and then choose what type of monitoring we want to perform: ping, HTTP / HTTPS, keyword and check ports (both if the service is working as if it is open correctly on your router). In case there is an alert, this tool can notify us by all these communication methods:
- SMS
- voice call
- Webhook
- Email to SMS
- Telegram
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Google Hangsout
The method of SMS alerts is only under subscription, that is, you must purchase the paid version so that you can be notified by SMS that a fall has occurred, but taking into account that it allows us email, Telegram, Slack and Twitter, it covers many typical communication scenarios both personally and professionally.
Other characteristics of this service is that it will allow us to see the uptime, downtime and also the latency if it has increased considerably. Not only can we verify that a service has fallen from one node, but from several to avoid routing problems from their servers to us, so we will have a double verification that “we have fallen”.
In the case of buying the PRO plan, we will have very interesting options such as that the minimum monitoring interval is 1 minute instead of 5 minutes, also including 20 SMS or voice calls, but the following we will have to pay for them. Other features of this PRO plan are that it monitors the status of the SSL / TLS of our website, indicating if there is a problem and even indicating when an SSL certificate is going to expire, and it allows customizing HTTP queries, ideal if you want to monitor a web server .
Registration in the service and start-up of the monitoring
The operation of this tool is really easy, we will simply have to register with our email and a password, then we must validate our account by clicking on the email received, and once we have clicked, it will take us directly to the main monitoring menu.
In the main menu of UptimeRobot we will be able to see everything we are monitoring, uptime characteristics and also options of the service’s own account.
The first thing we have to do is click on ” Add new monitor ” to start monitoring our Internet connection, or a service that we want to check continuously.
The first thing we must do is choose the type of monitor, UptimeRobot allows us a total of five types of monitoring, but the last one from Heartbeat is not available in the free version. We can choose between HTTP and HTTPS, Keywork, ping (ICMP) and also port. This last option is very interesting because it will allow us to easily monitor a TCP port, since the normal thing is that in the Internet WAN we have the ICMP deactivated to remain «invisible».
In the section on the right we can see the contact forms, by default the contact form is through email, but later we can add other contact forms such as Twitter, Telegram, Slack etc.
We will first choose the type “ping”, we give this monitor a name that must be unique, it should not be repeated if we then create more. In the IP or host section is where we can find the public IP address, the domain of our website, and even our dynamic DNS. We can also choose the monitoring interval, the free version is at least 5 minutes, but we could configure more time without problems.
Once we have configured it, we can see that the uptime is already 100% because it has verified that the ping has been carried out correctly. If our firewall is preventing ICMP, logically this monitor will not serve us because it will not get any kind of response. In our case, we do not have ICMP activated on the Internet WAN, but since we do have open TCP ports to different services, we can monitor by port.
If we get into one of the monitors created, we can see the uptime in the last 24 hours in a graph, if we have just registered it, the bar will appear in gray, but little by little it will be completed in green if there is no problem. Another positive aspect is that it will show us the response time, ideal to check if there are any problems at the network level.
If instead of monitoring via ICMP (ping), we want to do it by port, we simply define a port that already comes preconfigured, and select “custom” to indicate the TCP port that we want, in this way, we will have greater freedom by if we use different ports from the standard ones.
In this article we have verified that as soon as the service detects that the connection has dropped, it sends us an email almost in real time, we must take into account that the verification interval is 5 minutes in the free version. If you need to monitor basic services from the Internet, such as our own Internet connection, or a service that we have on a server, and you do not have the necessary knowledge to install a monitoring system, this tool will be really useful for you.
We believe that the PRO version is only necessary in case you need SMS or voice call alerts, monitor SSL with your digital certificate from your web server, or if you need the verification interval to be at least every 1 minute. The price it has is quite competitive, but the free version covers most domestic scenarios.
We recommend you visit the official website of UptimeRobot where you will find all the information about the service.
