All you need to do is contact your Sales Representative or your Account Manager to get your first Free Advanced Availability Monitoring Service. You'll be able to choose from URL Content, FTP File Retrieval or Mail Send/Receive Monitoring Services.

For the URL Content Monitoring, please provide:
the URL of the webpage you want us to monitor and 5 words from the static content of your page.

For the FTP File Retrieval Monitoring, please provide:
the FTP IP address, user credentials and custom port number (if applicable) to monitor and talk to your Account Manager for final setup details.

For the Mail Send/Receive Monitoring, please provide:

• Mail Send
• SMTP Host IP and custom port (if applicable)
• SMTP user credentials
• Send-to address
• Mail Receive
• Receiving protocol (POP3 or IMAP4)
• POP3 / IMAP4 Receiving Host IP
• POP3 / IMAP4 user credentials (should map to the Send-to address above)

If your website is a critical part of your business, monitoring is always crucial.

Advanced Availability Monitoring Services let Rackspace respond to your website issues and resolve them faster.

• Click here for more information on how our Monitoring Services work

URL Availability Monitoring

What It Does
This type of Monitor lets us know whether a specific URL resolves, providing you with end-to-end verification that the tested service is running and responding in a timely fashion.

The Value Of It
We'll know when your service is down (web server, database, mail server, etc.), times out or returns an error.

Verifies:

• Connectivity
• Port and service response

Level Of Monitoring
LOW

Synthetic Transaction Monitoring

What It Does
Synthetic Transaction Monitoring checks your webpage availability and acts as a synthetic end-user on your website. This synthetic end-user performs several tasks on your site such as adding items to a cart, logging in, paying, etc.

The Value Of It
Excellent for e-commerce sites when you want to know that the checkout process is working for the customer. Synthetic transactions can help identify performance and availability issues before they impact your customers and your revenue.

This alerts when one of the following fails:

• Your webpage is down
• One of the steps fails to execute

Verifies:

• All URL Content metrics
• Proper application behavior
• Software
• Database
• Transactions
• Processing

Supports:

• DHTML
• JavaScript
• Applets
• XML

Level Of Monitoring
HIGH

Mail Send/Receive

What It Does
Send/Receive Monitoring contacts a Mail Server via the network. It verifies that the mail server is accepting requests and that a message can be sent and retrieved.

The Value Of It
Alerts us when your email is not working.

Verifies:

• Connectivity
• Authorization
• Port and service response
• Timeout on send or receive

Supports:

• SMTP
• POP3
• IMAP4

Level Of Monitoring
Not Applicable

The standard monitoring included with Rackspace hosting solutions is equivalent to basic URL or Port Monitoring, meaning Rackspace only checks to make sure server ports are responding. It does not let us know if the end user is receiving content the way you intended. Advanced Availability Monitoring, on the other hand, verifies that what is being delivered to the end user is right, and that your business-critical services are running properly.

On many occasions, the content of your webpage can be distorted or somebody can hack into your system and put up content you don't want your customers to see. In order to avoid this, a URL Content monitor should be in place.

FTP File Retrieval and Mail Send/Receive monitors ensure that your site's mail and FTP download services are not only available but working correctly.

Yes, we can. Even if a server isn't hosted at Rackspace, we can monitor the URL and contact you when we receive alerts. You will need to provide Rackspace with detailed emergency instructions and contact information since we can not fix the problem because your server isn't in one of our data centers.

Yes, but there is an additional charge for customized intervals. As a default, any Advanced Availability Monitor is polled every 10 minutes. Custom polling intervals can be as frequent as every 2 minutes.