This setting allows you to specify how long a parent monitor’s result is valid for, in the case of any of its child monitors. Before a child monitor is checked, it looks at its parent’s last result, and if this result has gone “stale” (i.e. is older than the number of seconds set in the “Time Until Parent Is Stale” setting), it will tell the parent to run again just before the child is run.
This means that a parent monitor can be set to run very infrequently, for example, every 15 minutes, but if it has any child monitors that run more frequently, the parent monitor might be run much more often so that its result is never “stale” before one of its child monitors runs.
These extra monitor checks still show in the parent as regular checks, and will appear in its charts etc. just as with normal results.
This setting is set to 60 seconds by default, to ensure that a parent monitor result is never too old, but the setting can be disabled entirely by setting “Time Until Parent Is Stale” to 0 (zero). With the setting disabled, any child monitors will be checked as normal, but the parent monitor won’t be re-checked first. The parent monitor will continue to be checked on its own regular cycle, independent of its child monitors.
We recently released version 1.3 of Server Check, which introduces two new monitor types, as well as a window layout save feature, and some changes to monitor reports.
Server Check is free software for monitoring servers and websites for downtime, and provides email alerts (via your own SMTP server or via our built-in mail system) and SMS alerts to your mobile phone, as well as on-screen and audible alerts.
We recently released version 1.3, which adds two new monitor types – you can monitor NTP servers (Network Time Protocol) for downtime, and you can also monitor TLS certificates (Transport Layer Security) for downtime (which would usually indicate an expired or incorrectly-installed certificate).
We recognise that some users like to customise the layout of Server Check and now it’s easy to save your layout and recall it using the Work Area Save and Reload features, found in the Window menu. Now if you need to close some panels, change the size of others or move them around, you can bring back your own personalised layout simply using the work area reload feature, putting things back where you like them to be.
We’ve also added the option to choose any response code to the HTTP monitor type, which means you can monitor websites for downtime regardless of what the response code is. Of course, you can still specify the desired response code if that’s what you’re looking to keep an eye on.
Finally, we made some tweaks to the failure statistics reset functions to make these work better, and we improved the reports generation system to allow users to select how far back in time you want the report to cover. This means that if you had some failures six months ago as well as some in the last month, but you only want the boss to receive email reports covering the last month, you can now do this very easily.
We think you’ll love the improvements we’ve made, but if there’s anything else you’d like to see or you have any comments or questions about using Server Check to monitor your websites and servers for that all-important downtime, get in touch with us via our Contact page.
You can download Server Check, the free server monitoring software, by clicking here. Don’t forget to register your copy for a free 10-monitor license, which unlocks all monitor types!
Server Check is 3 years young, and we’ve been checking web servers for downtime since 2018.
When we launched Server Check in March 2018, we thought it would be a tidy little utility that would allow simple monitoring of web sites and pinging of web servers, with a pop-up that alerted you to a problem.
Fast-forward to 2021, and Server Check has become a fully-featured application with monitoring for different types of connection, and alerts in several forms – emails, SMS text, audible alarm and on-screen pop-up.
Server Check also now has a web interface for remote monitoring of the system. With full control over the information that is displayed, and built-in uptime pages that your customers can use to check your system uptime stats, the web server is included with all versions of Server Check – even the free 10-monitor version.
We know our users love the “set-and-forget” aspect of Server Check. It’s simple to install, load up your monitor set and then let Server Check do the rest. In an ideal world, you’d never hear from it again – but we all know that servers and websites can go down or offline for all sorts of reasons. Server Check will always be listening and checking on those valuable servers, sites and connections, including HTTP, SMTP, MySQL, etc. If and when you get that email/text or hear the Server Check siren sound, you know that you’ve got a chance to sort out the problem before it becomes… a problem!
We’re busy working on some new features which will allow monitor sets to be synchronised between multiple Server Check installations, as well as allow one installation of Server Check to check that another installation is up and running. Yes, we want Server Check to be able to keep an eye on itself! It’s not that we think it’s unreliable, but we know that peace of mind can be very comforting, and this will add an additional layer of redundancy to the Server Check Monitoring System.
We are also working on adding a “response code” option to the HTTP monitor checks, which means that Server Check can check a website or web server and look for more than just a reponse code of 200.
Thanks for being a Server Check user! We’re proud of how far Server Check has come in only 3 years, and if you haven’t joined our growing user base yet, why not give the FREE 10-monitor version of Server Check a try? You can use it without registration and monitor up to 10 HTTP or ICMP PING connections, and if you register the software (again, for FREE) you can add different types of monitors including SMTP, IMAP, FTP, MySQL, TCP and POP.
The daily stats page generated by the Server Check Monitoring System
Not everyone who uses the Server Check Monitoring System knows that it has a built-in web server that allows for remote viewing of monitor stats and monitor reports, as well as daily and monthly uptime pages which can be used for public uptime pages.
The web server is part of Server Check and doesn’t require additional stacks or software to be installed – there’s no need to have Apache or IIS running, and no need for PHP or MySQL. Everything you need is built right into Server Check. You can even add an SSL/TLS certificate (in PFX format) to the web server configuration so that all web pages can be served securely.
The best thing about all this is that the web server is fully functional even in the FREE versions of Server Check!
The web server configuration settings built into Server Check allow users to select which monitors are displayed, select which types of monitors are displayed, restrict the web pages to show only monitors with particular information or statuses (for example, show only healthy monitors and exclude any that are failing or failed), and so on. The stats pages will show all monitors that have the web feature switched on and that match the selections in the web server configuration.
However, a company might want to make the stats for one (or selected) monitor(s) available to view without showing all the others that are set up in their Server Check installation (for example, if you’re a web hosting reseller or web developer and want to allow customers to view the stats for their own web sites only).
We’ve now added a new feature that makes this exact feature available to all Server Check users. It’s ready to go in the latest version (which you can download here). The new unique URL codes allow individual, specific monitors to be viewed in the stats web pages, easily and quickly.
Let’s see how this works.
Define your unique URL code in the monitor edit panel:
Server Check’s new unique monitor codes for use in URLs
Note: when adding new monitors, a unique code will be automatically generated but you can change this if you wish to.
The monitor can now be viewed by visiting the URL of your Server Check installation, plus the URL of the stats page you want to view, plus the unique code as a “?view=” query string key/value pair in the URL. For example, if your IP address is “1.2.3.4” and your default daily stats page URL is “/daily” then a specific monitor’s unique URL would look something like this:
Note: the base URL of your Server Check installation may be an IP address, or a domain name if you have set this up in your DNS correctly and opened/forwarded the correct port for the web server configuration.
The query string key “view” can also be abbreviated or omitted, as in these examples:
As you can see, this feature is extremely useful for sharing stats with different customers, departments, or for creating different views and combinations of stats pages.
The unique URL codes allow monitor stats pages to be visited even when your main default pages are password protected (if you have this configured in the Web Server settings panel). This way, you can still see all stats and results securely as an admin, whilst clients can visit their unique URLs without needing any log in details – they just need the URL you provide to them. If you wish to disable this type of access, simply leave the monitor’s unique URL code blank and the URL will no longer work.
We’ve just released Server Check v1.2.20201026 which adds a few new features that offer greater convenience and easier, quicker management by system admins:
We’ve added a new bulk monitor editing panel to allow changes to be made to all or multiple selected monitors at once, and we’ve removed the individual bulk email and SMS edit options as the new panel includes these options.
An optional “Auto Unpause” setting is now available and can be configured via the settings panel. This allows a paused system to be automatically unpaused after specified time, which is great if you pause Server Check and forget to unpause it! This new feature is optional, and is disabled by default.
We’ve made the monitor edit window sizes consistent between monitor types – previously when you scrolled through the edit window for your monitors you may have found that the windows bounced around a bit, but we’ve fixed them all at the same size now.
Some improvements have been made to behind-the-scenes handling of licensing server connection failures, but remember that Server Check still requires internet access to keep your license valid and to check for software updates.
We’ve fixed some issues and conflicts with some anti-virus software. Any virus alerts that previous versions of Server Check were causing were, of course, false – Server Check is not malicious software and contains nothing untoward. However we noticed some false positives in certain anti-virus environments so we’ve fixed that.
A runtime error caused by the tray icon at program launch has also been fixed – this was very intermittent but would cause Server Check to terminate when it occurred.
If you already have Server Check installed, you can update your software right now in the Help menu of the main program panel.
Want to give these latest features a try? If you’re not already a Server Check user, you can get a FREE lifetime license to monitor up to 10 monitors – it will never expire! Download Server Check right away – it only takes five minutes to install and get going!
Server Check version 1.0.20200621 has just been released and is available to download immediately.
This version adds a couple of simple but very handy features:
Optional email and SMS messages when an update for Server Check is available: if Server Check is running on a “headless” system or sits in the middle of a datacentre with no physical access, system admins can now receive alerts to let them know an update is available. The system will only send the alerts once per software release.
Power alerts are now sent when mains power fails: previously, Server Check would send a power alert only if running on a critically low battery. This behaviour has been changed so that Server Check will now send a power alert (optional emails and/or SMS messages) when mains power fails and a battery takes over providing power.
This release also includes a major performance improvement to the monthly uptime stats page, and a “Page Loading…” screen has also been added for extra reassurance that Server Check is crunching the numbers and generating the page.
All web pages that Server Check includes are generated on-demand, so no statistics are ever cached or out of date. This means you’ll always know the very latest stats and status when you use Server Check!
This release modifies the time Server Check will perform its auto-update check and adds a new layout option to the summary window. Now the summary window can be stacked either horizontally or vertically!
The added layout option means that Server Check is more flexible that ever, with a user interface that can be laid out exactly how you want it… making sure the information you need is right where you want it!
