Site Monitoring
Site Monitoring is a paid add-on designed to help you detect and respond quickly to an outage on your website’s homepage by the domain.
With the Site Monitoring product, WP Engine will monitor selected sites on your account to confirm that your environments are accessible to visitors at their live domains. Notification alerts can also be configured to ensure you’re always in the loop, should any issue arise.
About Outages
WP Engine’s Site Monitoring product will send a ping to each of the selected Production environment’s primary domains once every five minutes.
If an outage is detected, you will see an alert banner at the top of the Site Monitoring page indicating such. If you have alerts configured, you will also receive an alert with the environment name and the error code.
Site Monitoring detects outages on the homepage (such as a 404 or 500 error) and does not provide information regarding server-level outages. Therefore we also recommend signing up for platform status updates at wpenginestatus.com.
Detecting an Outage
Site Monitoring pings the Primary domain of the selected Production environments once every five minutes.
Only the homepage URL is monitored. No additional URLs can be monitored, even if those URLs are referenced on the homepage. For example, https://domain.com/ is monitored, but an image used on that homepage https://domain.com/wp-content/images/image.png is not monitored.
If the monitoring ping receives a response code that indicates an outage, we immediately ping two more times. If the third request fails, an alert is created. These outage alert thresholds cannot be adjusted.
Some of the most common domain response codes the Site Monitoring product will look for are:
- 403 – Forbidden error
- 404 – Page not found
- 500 – Internal Server Error (“Whitescreen of Death”)
- 502 – Bad Gateway
- 503 – Service Unavailable
- 504 – Gateway Timeout
All 2xx/3xx status codes, which indicate success or redirection (EX: 200 or 301), are used to determine if the site is accessible and that there is no outage.
NOTE
These response codes and more can be found in your site’s Access Logs. Learn about common response codes in our guide.
Responding to an Outage
Being notified when an outage is occurring is the first step to a quick resolution. Once you’re aware of the environment that’s experiencing an outage you’ll need to proceed swiftly to collect information and triage the error.
The best thing to do when your site is down is to determine if the downtime is caused by an internal factor (a modification you, or your team, have recently made to the site, for example) or an external one (WP Engine is experiencing degraded performance or scheduled maintenance, for example) and then go from there.
- First, check WP Engine’s System Status page. This is where you can keep on top of any disruptions in service to our WP platform, support services, or product features.
- Alternatively, if you configure Site Monitoring email alerts, the outage email will tell you our current platform status.
- If there are no outages on WP Engine’s System Status page, you should next check the specific environment’s Access Logs.
- Use the filters in the Access Logs to find the response code you are troubleshooting: 400, 404, 500, 502, 504, etc.
- If you do not see any errors in the Access Logs, you should check the environment’s Error Logs for any recent entries.
Once you have found the error in the logs, you can troubleshoot in a few ways:
- Cross-reference the response codes with our Common WordPress Error guide. https://wpengine.com/support/error/
- Cross-reference the error code with our Apache Errors guide. https://wpengine.com/support/troubleshoot-wordpress-wp-engine-error-log/
- Review our Troubleshooting WordPress guide to help diagnose and triage the issue. https://wpengine.com/support/troubleshoot-wordpress/
- Check for any recent changes to the site. Changes can be reverted easily if needed by using our automated backup and restore functionality. https://wpengine.com/support/restore/
- Contact Support. Our Support team can help look into any issues you may be experiencing. While we cannot support questions related to specific code, our team is composed of experienced troubleshooters who are happy to help interpret logs and pinpoint issues. You can reach out to Support 24×7, 365 days a year!
503 Error
When the Smart Plugin Manager update service is running, and maintenance mode is enabled, Site Monitoring may alert with a 503 error. This error is temporary and will be resolved when the updates have completed and maintenance mode is lifted. In future iterations, a 503 due to SPM will indicate an update is in progress and will not generate an outage alert.
Access Site Monitoring
Managing the Site Monitoring product can be managed from your WP Engine User Portal.
- Log in to the WP Engine User Portal
- Expand Tools in the main menu
- Select Site Monitoring
This page will have a variety of information available. The information in the table can be adjusted to display a specific time period by changing the time frame dropdown at the top of the columns.
Status
The Status column indicates the current uptime status of the environment.
- ✅ A green checkmark with the status “No current outages” indicates the environment is available.
- 🚫 A red crossed-through circle indicates the site is experiencing an outage. The response code that Site Monitoring is detecting will display next to it.
Failed Checks
The failed checks column indicates the number of pings to your site that failed. Failed pings do not always indicate a site is down, but can indicate a less critical issue. Failed pings are measured against all pings to your site during the selected time period.
Response Time
The response time displayed for each environment is the average time it takes for your website to respond to our monitoring pings, measured in milliseconds (ms). The average is calculated over the time period selected in the dropdown located at the top of the columns.
Add Site Monitor
Site Monitoring can be purchased when you first sign up for a plan, any time from the User Portal, or by reaching out to your WP Engine Account Manager. Once you have acquired the add-on, you will then need to select and activate Site Monitoring for the desired environments.
- Log in to the User Portal
- Select Tools
- Then select Site Monitoring
- Click Add Monitors
- Select the environment name(s) from the dropdown that you wish to monitor
- Only Production environments can be monitored
- Click Monitor Environment
Alert Preferences
The Site Monitoring product allows for the configuration of alert notifications. If an outage is detected, this alert will supply the environment name, error or response code, and WP Engine’s current platform status to help you quickly diagnose the issue.
Alert notifications are sent when there is an outage, and sent again when there is no longer an outage detected. You will not continuously receive alerts during a failure.
Additionally, users that are selected to receive alerts will receive them for all environments that report an outage. Future iterations will include the ability to specify users for each environment.
The contacts available to receive notifications are pulled from the account owners and full users assigned to the monitored environments. All users selected will receive alerts for all monitored environments.
To select users that should receive alerts:
- Log in to the WP Engine User Portal
- Expand Tools in the main menu
- Select Site Monitoring
- Click Alert Preferences
- Toggle Alert Notifications to On
- Under Email Contacts, select one or multiple users to receive alerts
- Click Save Preferences
Limitations
There are currently some situations where the Site Monitoring service is not yet supported:
- Multisite is not supported.
- Password-protected sites (either through WP Engine or a third-party) are not supported.
- Atlas accounts are not supported.
- Email alerts are the only available notification type. (Additional notification channels will be available in the future.)
- Site Monitoring will only take place on Production environments.
- Only the Primary domain will be tested. Learn more about the Primary domain here.
- Site Monitoring identifies site-level issues only. i.e. 404, 500 etc
Site Monitoring and APM
Site Monitoring is a standalone product and therefore does not require New Relic or Application Performance Monitoring (APM). However, Site Monitoring and APM can be used at the same time and will complement one another.
Site Monitoring provides alerts when your website has an issue, such as a 404. While APM provides more granular code-level information and can have custom alerts configured.
