The Network Monitoring facility is a service for computer system administrators. It will send you an SMS Alert you when your Internet connected server fails to respond to our network “ping” test. There are three network tests available: ICMP Ping; HTTP Ping; and SMTP Ping.

ICMP Ping
We send a single ICMP echo request to your nominated server. If we do not get a response within 5 seconds we will send you an SMS Alert.

HTTP Ping
Not really a “ping” in the traditional sense of the word, we actually connect to port 80 on the server from the URL you provide and issue a HTTP HEAD statement to the page specified. If we are unable to connect to the web server, or if the server does not respond with a “200 OK” header, we will send you an alert. Pages that issue a “Location:” redirect header may cause this test to fail.

SMTP Ping
Once again a loose interpretation of the term: “ping”. Here we connect to your SMTP server and issue a HELO statement. If we are unable to connect to the server, or if the mail server does not respond appropriately, we will send you an SMS Alert.

After we have sent you a “server down” notification, we will also send you a “server recovered” notification when your server recovers.

Additional notes
Our servers are located in a telco-grade data centre in Melbourne. The housing facility runs BGP4 and currently operates a 155Mb/s service to Optus and a 100Mb/s link to Connect.com. The network tests are conducted once every 10 minutes. To ensure that you do not receive spurious Alerts, before we run the tests we first check our own network connectivity by pinging core routers in the Telstra network and the Optus network.