EnterraHost
EnterraMon watches a domain from one or more regions and emails you when something breaks. Adding a site is two steps, and the second one is the step people miss.
Open the client area, then EnterraMon, then Add domain.
What the form asks for
Four fields, and only one of them is a real decision.
Portfolio or product
The picker only appears when your account has more than one EnterraMon service. Domains belong to a service, and that is what the domain allowance counts against. The card shows used and maximum slots beside the field.
If you have a single service the form skips the question and files the domain there.
Domain
The name you want monitored, without a path or a www. EnterraMon checks the site over HTTP, so the interesting part of the answer is what the server returns at that hostname.
Monitoring region
Where the checks run from. There are five.
| Region code | Location |
|---|---|
AF-CPT | Cape Town, South Africa |
US-STL | St. Louis, United States |
EU-FRA | Frankfurt, Germany |
OC-SYD | Sydney, Australia |
AS-SIN | Singapore |
Cape Town is the default. Pick the region nearest the audience you care about rather than the region nearest you, because the latency figure is a measurement of the path between that region and your server. Testing a London audience from Cape Town answers a question nobody asked.
You can add a second region later. Adding a second region covers when that is worth the extra checks.
Also add to EnterraSEO
A checkbox that appears when your account has an EnterraSEO plan. Tick it and the same domain is added to EnterraSEO as well, so one submission covers both products.
Without an SEO plan the box is shown disabled with an upgrade prompt. The tick is never a gate on the EnterraMon side. If the SEO add fails, the domain still lands in EnterraMon and you are told what happened rather than the whole submission failing quietly.
The domain starts pending
A newly added domain is not monitored yet. It goes in with the status pending verification, and it stays there until you prove you control it.
The reason is ownership. EnterraMon tests from outside your network and reports what it finds, and a service that will monitor any hostname a stranger types is a service that can be pointed at other people’s infrastructure. So the domain sits in your portfolio, takes its slot, and produces no checks and no alerts until it is verified.
Nothing else is missing at this point. The region is stored, the service owns the domain, and the only thing standing between you and the first result is the verification step. Verify your domain walks the three methods.
Run a test without adding anything
If you want a result before committing a slot, use Run on-demand audit instead. It takes any public domain, including one that is not in your portfolio, and it does not create a monitored site.
That is the right tool for a prospect’s site, a competitor, or your own domain before you decide to monitor it. It is covered in reading a latency alert.
What happens after verification
Once a domain is verified its status moves to active and polling begins. EnterraMon starts checking on its own schedule, records each result, and raises an alert when something crosses a threshold rather than on the first failed request. The confirmation logic is the subject of understanding a downtime event.
Alerts go nowhere until you have contacts configured. Set them up before you need them, because an alert with no recipient is a log entry. Setting up alert contacts is the next step.
When a domain will not verify
A domain that stays pending is almost always a record that has not propagated, or one added at the wrong level. The verification screen keeps the last error it saw, which names the record it looked for and what it found instead.
Two causes cover most cases. The record was created on a subdomain when the apex was needed, or a proxy in front of the domain is answering for the hostname and hiding the record. Both are diagnosable with the DNS lookup tool, which reads the record from five regions at once and shows you what the public resolvers actually return.
EnterraMon does not verify a domain by retrying forever. Verification is a request you make, and the failure message is there to be read rather than waited out.