Dotcom-Monitor systems offer a robust set of monitoring tools that should be carefully adjusted to detect the level of performance required for each monitored target. Due to the number and variety of alerting factors, you may need to tweak some of the settings on your monitors in order to eliminate false positives.
To determine if the alerts you are receiving are valid, check out this article on identifying false positives.
If you still do not wish to receive alerts the way they are currently configured, running an online report from the Device Manager for the time during which you received the alerts will give you more insight into what is triggering the alerts.
Maximum Time Expired
If the error on the online report states “(300) task Maximum timeout expired” this means that the task took longer to complete than the maximum timeout specified for the task. This may point to a legitimate issue, but it is up to you to determine at what point you need to receive alerts. If you feel that you are receiving too many alerts, you can edit the task and increase the max timeout limit.
Location Specific Errors
If you are monitoring from multiple locations, but are only experiencing issues from a single location, there are several things you can check.
IP Restricted access
If your server access is limited via IP address, you should make sure that you have added the ip addresses of all monitoring locations to your IP address access list.
Security Certificates Required
If your server requires a certificate to access content, you must open a support ticket to upload the certificate to each monitoring location.
Great Firewall of China
If you are experiencing issues from a location in China, you may be seeing the results of the “Great Firewall of China.” As the Chinese government maintains tight control over what content is accessible from within the country, sometimes content is filtered out as inaccessible or bandwidth to certain sites are throttled so that elements from the site time out. In these cases there is often little you can do since the Chinese government is in control of the network.
Contact Support
If you are experiencing issues from one or a few specific locations, you can open up a support ticket and our support team will work with you to identify other possible issues. Sometimes there may be issues with a DNS server routing incorrectly, reverse DNS lookup, or an issue specific to the monitoring location.
UserView Timeouts
If you are running a UserView script, you may need to add a delay to the script to give the site more time to load all elements properly. You can also repeat the step, such as clicking on an href after adding a delay, so in case the link was not rendered on the page the first time, it will try to click it again.