What Types of ServerOwl™ Notifications Are There?

Last modified: October 7, 2019

ServerOwl currently supports four types of server notifications:- timeout; slow; fail; and incomplete. We also have notifications for absent or changing polled background processes. All these notifications are triggered under different circumstances and are controlled by different settings.

For server notificaitons, the settings can be seesn on the Server edit screen as shown in Figure 1 below. This screen will allow you to silence the different types of notifications for each server.

Figure 1

Timeout Notification

The main notification for monitored servers that ServerOwl provides is the Timeout notification. This notification is triggered when the inflow of visitor messages to ServerOwl stops, and ServerOwl is unable to connect to the health URL within the timeout period.

ServerOwl will monitor the inflow of messages from people visiting your websites and learn what your server's expected usage is. When the flow of messages drops below 20% of the expected, ServerOwl will attempt to connect to the health URL. If this connection fails, then a timeout event will be recorded. Once a series of timeout events has been recorded, ServerOwl will notify the email and SMS recipients for the server.

If you server triggers this notification too frequently, you can silence this notification in the Server Edit screen in figure 1 above, by changing the radio button under the 'Timeout' heading.

Slow Notification

The next most common notification for monitored servers is the Slow notification. ServerOwl monitors the browsers statistics from your visitors to your website and calculates a base line for the DOM ready event. Once the DOM ready event blows out to 10 times its average for the last 15 or more visitors, a Slow event will be raised. Once a series of Slow events have been recorded, ServerOwl will send out notifications to the selected email and SMS recipients.

This notification is designed to alert you when your server has been overloaded, although still responding. This event will often be caused by your server experiencing a high level of usage, or could be under a DOS attack, or could have a background process that is consuming resources and preventing your server from functioning normally.

If you server triggers this notification too frequently, you can silence this notification in the Server Edit screen in figure 1 above, by changing the radio button under the 'Slow' heading.

Fail Notification

ServerOwl will monitor your website's visitors and when their messages stop, ServerOwl will attempt to contact your server's health URL. If this connection returns a HTML error response, then this will be recorded as a Fail event. The most common are fail events are server 500 errors, when there is something internal to your server that is preventing the normal response. Once a series of Fail events have been recorded, ServerOwl will send out notifications to the selected email and SMS recipients.

If you server triggers this notifications too frequently, you can silence this notification in the Server Edit screen in figure 1 above, by changing the radio button under the 'Fail' heading.

Incomplete Notification

ServerOwl will also monitor your server for incomplete HTML responses. This event is normally caused when your website is generating an error partway through rendering the HTML and has not generated the complete page, missing the closing body and html tags.

This event is common when your website is returning a 200 status code, although the resulting page is deformed be an error message. This event is only triggered when ServerOwl attempts to connect to the health URL when the visitor's messages drops below the 20% threshold.

If you server triggers this notifications too frequently, you can silence this notification in the Server Edit screen in figure 1 above, by changing the radio button under the 'Incomplete' heading.

Background Process Notifications

For polled background processes, ServerOwl will monitor REST messages sent at the completions of the process. These messages can have an error code and/or error message and are predicted to occur in a periodic frequency.

ServerOwl will monitor these events and if the returned message or code changes, you will be notified of the change in response. Also after a number of events, ServerOwl will deduce the frequency of the event and notify you of the event fails to occur in that predicted period.

If you background process is triggering this event too frequently, then you can silence this event by removing all recipients from email and SMS lists.

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