A Closer Look at AlertBot’s Email Reports

At AlertBot, we know our customers don’t want too much data about their websites and tasks. Instead, they want clear, organized, and reliable intelligence that tells them: what happened recently, what’s happening now, what’s likely to happen in the near future — and what they can do about it. That’s where email reports enter the story.

Here are the five sections in AlertBot’s email reports: Availability, Performance, Common Errors, Failure Events, and Confirmed Failures.

Availability

The Availability section of the email report displays the overall uptime of the websites that you are testing. Additionally, it is color coded.

• Green indicates that everything is working perfectly (or nearly perfectly).
• Yellow indicates that there may be some minor concerns.
• Red indicates significant concerns that should be addressed.

Performance

The performance section of the email report provides details for the websites that you are testing. It displays a breakdown (measured in seconds) of each process, along with individual web pages that are associated with that process.

This is useful for daily website monitoring and studying long-term patterns to ensure their functionality. It helps in checking the performance of websites on a regular basis and analyzing trends over time. This is important to ensure that websites are functioning properly and meeting their objectives.

Common Errors

The email report’s common errors section shows all failures and transition errors that happened within a certain time. The list includes confirmed events, as well as those that are intermittent. Use this information to check for problems with websites or processes, or issues that need more investigating and analyzing.

Failure Events

Here, you will find a list of all confirmed failures (as indicated in the Common Errors section) for each hour in the past week. The failure events are also color coded:

• Red indicates significant areas of concern.
• Yellow indicates minor areas of concern (some confirmed failures).
• Green indicates no areas of concern.

Confirmed Failures

Finally, the confirmed failures section of the email report logs all problem areas. Notably, these have all been confirmed from a secondary location — i.e., they are actual failure events and not false positives.

With this in mind, there can be scenarios where confirmed failure events do not necessarily indicate a problem. For example, you may see that over the past week a website failed 10 times at 1:00am. However, after digging deeper you may discover that this is happening due to maintenance. If so, then you can simply set up a maintenance window.

The Final Word

In the 1990s flick Apollo 13, the big brains at NASA said that “failure is not an option.” Unfortunately, down here on earth, sometimes things in general — and websites and their related processes specifically — don’t work as expected.

Fortunately, that’s where AlertBot’s detailed, yet clear and focused, email reports make a transformative difference. It’s not just raw information. It’s actionable intelligence!

But what sets AlertBot apart is not just the information it provides, but how it presents it. Our reports are clear, concise, and focused, ensuring that you can quickly grasp the key insights without getting lost in a sea of technical jargon. We understand that not everyone is a tech expert, and that’s why we’ve made our reports accessible to all.

So why wait? Take control of your online presence and ensure that your website is running smoothly. Don’t let website issues hold you back – let AlertBot be your trusted companion in the digital realm.

Getting started with AlertBot is a breeze. With our free trial, you can experience the power of our email reports without any commitment. No need to download or install anything, and rest assured, we won’t ask for any billing information. In just a matter of minutes, you’ll be fully set up and ready to uncover the hidden potential of your website: click here.

The year was 1995. Michael Jordan returned to the NBA. Amazon sold its first book. Windows 95 unleashed the era of taskbars, long filenames, and the recycle bin. And when people weren’t dancing the Macarena, they were flocking to see Apollo 13 and hear Tom Hanks utter the phrase that would launch millions of (mostly annoying) impersonations: “Houston, we have a problem.”

Thankfully, the eggheads in space and the eggheads on the ground worked tirelessly (and apparently smoked a whole lot of cigarettes) to get the crew home. But it was the pivotal moment when the failure was first reported that triggered the spectacular problem-solving process. If it happened an hour — or maybe even a few minutes — later, then the outcome could have been tragic instead of triumphant.

Admittedly, the brave, intrepid professionals in charge of keeping their organization’s website online and functional DON’T have to deal with life-and-death scenarios. But they DO need to deal with problems that, if left unsolved, will significantly damage competitive advantage, brand reputation and sales (immediately if we’re talking e-commerce, and eventually if we aren’t). And that’s where AlertBot’s failure alerting feature enters the picture.

What is Failure Alerting?

Failure alerting is when designated individuals — such as a SysAdmin, CTO, CIO, CEO, and so on — are proactively notified when something goes wrong with a website, such as downtime, errors, slowness, or unresponsive behavior.

As a result, just like in Apollo 13, the right people can take swift, intelligent action to fix things before visitors/customers sound the alarm bell, or worse, head out the (virtual) door and go straight to a competitor without looking back.

Notification Methods

AlertBot customers can choose any or all of the following methods to notify team members of a website failure event:

• Email
• Text Message
• Phone Call

For example, a SysAdmin could receive an email, a text message, and a phone call the moment something goes wrong.

Automatic Escalation

Now, if we were in NASA Mission Control circa 1970, someone wearing really thick horned-rimmed glasses would rise above the cigarette smoke and ask: What happens if the SysAdmin doesn’t receive the email, text message, and phone call? It’s a good question, and there is an even better answer: don’t worry about it.

AlertBot’s failure reporting feature can be configured to escalate the website failure warning if certain individuals don’t respond within a specific timeframe. For example, if a SysAdmin is indisposed for any reason (driving, sleeping, etc.), then after two minutes the alert can be pushed to another designated team member such as the CTO. And if the CTO doesn’t respond within two minutes, then the alert can be pushed to the CIO, and so on.

Ideally, the individual (or multiple individuals) who are sent the first alert receive it immediately, and take rapid action. But if they don’t or can’t, then the alert is escalated accordingly. It is important to note that all of this happens automatically, so there is no possibility of human error.

Granted, none of this is as entertaining as watching Apollo 13. There’s no rousing soundtrack or Tom Hanks. Heck, there’s not even Kevin Bacon.

But when it comes to fixing website problems as quickly as possible, organizations know that the less drama, the better. That’s precisely what AlertBot’s multi-channel, auto-escalating failure reporting feature delivers. We don’t need an Oscar. We just need extremely satisfied customers — and we have a lot of those.

Next Up: Reviewing Failure Events Online

 In our next blog, we’ll explore reviewing failure events online to pinpoint issues and detect problems. Stay tuned!

Launch a free trial of AlertBot’s acclaimed site uptime monitoring solution. No credit card. Nothing to download. Get started in minutes. And if you decide to purchase our solution, there are NO setup fees!

4 Essential Failure Analysis Reports for Monitoring Website Performance & Uptime

by Louis Kingston

It would be nice if the same commandment held for websites. However, even an infinity of buzz cuts cannot change the fact that, alas, sometimes websites fail. And so, the question then becomes: how do you minimize the likelihood, duration and severity of website failure?

The answer probably isn’t enough to inspire a movie. But it’s more than enough to help businesses detect and remedy underlying problems with their website before they become full-blown catastrophes: use failure analysis reports.

There are four types of failure analysis reports that every business should be generating on a regular basis: Waterfall Reports, Web Page Failure Reports, Downtime Tracking, and Failure Events.

• Waterfall Reports

Waterfall Reports enable businesses to analyze the performance of every object that loads on their web pages (e.g. scripts, stylesheets, images, etc.), in order to identify common sources of bottlenecks, errors and failures. Waterfall Reports also display HTTP response headers, which help track down the source of slowdowns and breakdowns.

• Web Page Failure Reports

Many business websites have dozens of pages, and e-commerce websites can easily have more than 50, 100, or even 1000. Manually hunting for problems can be tedious and futile. That’s where Web Page Failure Reports come to the rescue. They often contain a screenshot of data a page might display during a failure event log. This information can then be used to fix issues before they trigger visitor/ customer rage.

• Downtime Tracking

No, Downtime Tracking isn’t the name of one of those bands that never smile when they sing. Rather, it’s a type of report that contains statistics on website and server downtime. Understanding the size, scope and source of downtime issues is critical to resolving them.  

• Failure Event Logs

Knowing that a web page — or element(s) within a web page — are failing is important, but it’s not the full story. Failure Event Logs fill in the gaps by providing detailed information about what tests were performed, the geographical locations affected, and the errors identified.

The Bottom Line

Are failure analysis reports as gripping and captivating as Apollo 13? No. Are they vital to website performance and business success? Yes. Because while website failure is unfortunately an occasional option, it absolutely cannot become a regular habit.

At AlertBot, we provide our customers with all of these failure analysis reports (and more) so they can get ahead of problems and avoid catastrophes. Start a free trial today.

Louis is a writer, author, and avid film fan. He has been writing professionally for tech blogs and local organizations for over a decade. Louis currently resides in Allentown, PA, with his wife and German Shepherd Einstein, where he writes articles for InfoGenius, Inc, and overthinks the mythos of his favorite fandoms.

As website owners, uptime is about as crucial as making sure the front door on a shop owner’s local 24-hour business isn’t locked. We need visitors and customers to be able to reach us at all times. AlertBot’s service can ensure that uptime is consistent and reliable. Of all its features, AlertBot’s alerting process is what ultimately gives us website owners peace of mind.

AlertBot’s alerting system differs from most in the way that it works hard to avoid false alarms. No one likes getting an alert that their site is down when it really isn’t, and AlertBot combats this by testing your site’s availability from more than one location before sending you that digital elbow nudge about your site’s downtime. For example, if a test server in New York responds that your site is down (or producing an error) at the moment, it’ll test it from another location—say, California—within 60 seconds. It’s only after the failure is verified from this second location that it will deem the error legitimate and begin alerting.  You won’t just be getting an alert based on a brief outage in one isolated location.

The alerting process is versatile as well. You can be alerted via email, text-message or automated phone call, or through any combination of these options. For example, with SMS text messaging, you might get a message sent to your phone from AlertBot specifying what went down. You then can take whatever necessary steps needed—depending on the cause of the error—to get things back up and running smoothly again. AlertBot will continue to test your site’s availability until it is, and you’ll be notified via text once more once it’s back up, with the amount of time your site (or the specified portion or page of your site) was inaccessible displayed as well (whether it be minutes or hours). It’s a great way to remain aware of your website’s performance day or night. It’s also a great way to pinpoint problem areas of our site to know what to fix or improve.

For more information about AlertBot’s alerting services and features, click here.