This topic describes what site monitoring is, its typical scenarios, and supported protocol types.
The site monitoring feature is used to test network connectivity. This feature enables CloudMonitor to send detection requests that simulate real user access from Alibaba Cloud data centers to your sites, monitoring access to your sites.
Billing
Before you use a feature of Network Analysis and Monitoring for the first time, you must activate Network Analysis and Monitoring. You are not charged for activating Network Analysis and Monitoring. When you use the site monitoring feature, you are charged based on the actual resource usage. For more information about billing of the site monitoring feature, see Network Analysis and Monitoring.
Scenarios
To test and monitor access to your sites, CloudMonitor sends detection requests that simulate real user access from Alibaba Cloud data centers to your sites. Site monitoring is suitable for the following scenarios:
Monitoring of DNS resolution failures
You can configure a scheduled task to monitor DNS resolution failures. You can select the detection points of China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom in the provincial capitals of China. CloudMonitor sends detection requests to your domain name and obtains the resolution results of the domain name from the public DNS servers of the specified carriers. If the resolution results obtained by CloudMonitor are different from the DNS records configured for the domain name, the DNS servers of the specified carriers fail to resolve the domain name. DNS resolution failures may be caused by DNS hijacking and DNS poisoning.
Monitoring of service availability
You can configure a scheduled task to monitor an HTTP or HTTPS domain name. You can select detection points distributed around the world to send detection requests. The status code in the detection results indicates the availability of your service. After you configure alert rules, CloudMonitor sends alert notifications if an abnormal status is detected. Then, you can troubleshoot your service based on the information displayed in the console. In addition, you can observe the network latency between your service and the carrier detection points in different regions. The information helps you understand the user experience of carriers in different regions, and provides a reference for you to optimize the deployment architecture of your business system.
Comparative analysis of network quality
You can configure a scheduled task to send ping requests to a specific domain name. You can select carrier detection points in different countries and regions. After the task runs for a period of time, you can observe the network latency between your service and the carriers in different countries and regions. You can also configure multiple tasks to send ping requests to different domain names. By comparing the detection results of different tasks, you can observe the network quality of the domain names.
Supported protocol types
You can use a PC or mobile device to send simulated requests to your sites. The following protocol types are supported:
On the PC: HTTP, HTTPS, PING, DNS, TCP, UDP, SMTP, POP3, and FTP.
On the mobile device: HTTP, HTTPS, PING, and DNS.