EnterraHost
An alert that reaches nobody is a log entry. EnterraMon will hold up to three contacts, and each one can be told about a different set of events.
Open Alerts & recipients from the domain, or Notifications from the main menu, depending on whether you are configuring one site or the whole account.
What a contact holds
Three fields.
- Name, which is used in the message so the recipient knows who it was addressed to.
- Email address, which is where the alerts and any scheduled reports go.
- Mobile number in international format, such as
+1 555 123 1234, used for SMS.
A contact with an email address and no number still receives everything by email. The number is only needed for SMS.
The four toggles
Each contact carries its own switches, so a bookkeeper and an engineer can be on the same account without either being buried.
| Toggle | What it sends |
|---|---|
| Alerts | Uptime and downtime, page changes, HTTP errors and redirects |
| SSL | Certificate expiry warnings and critical expiry notices |
| Domain | Domain registration expiry warnings and critical notices |
| Reports | Scheduled reports, on the schedule set for that contact |
Turning Reports on is also what reveals the report schedule for that contact. It is covered in scheduling a weekly report.
SMS only goes on critical events
SMS is reserved for events that mean something is down or about to be. It is not sent for warnings.
The split is deliberate and it is worth knowing before you rely on a number for something. A certificate with fourteen days left sends an email. The same certificate inside the critical window sends an SMS. A page whose title changes sends an email. The site going down sends an SMS.
The reason is that a number which buzzes for a size warning is a number people start ignoring, and then they miss the one that mattered. Email has no such cost, so the warnings go there.
SMS credits
SMS is metered. Each account carries a monthly top-up, and extra one-off credits can be bought.
One-off credits are consumed first, then the monthly top-up. That order matters if you buy a block for a migration weekend, because the block is used before your recurring allowance and it will not carry over indefinitely.
The credit balance is shown beside the contacts, so you can tell whether a missing SMS was a routing decision or an empty balance.
Who to put in the list
The first contact should be whoever can act at three in the morning, or the on-call rota address if you have one. That person gets Alerts and SMS.
The second is usually a shared inbox, so an alert is not sitting in one person’s mailbox while they are on leave. Give it Alerts and Reports and no phone number.
The third, on an agency account, is the client. Give them Reports and leave the alerts with you. A client who receives a raw downtime alert will call you about it either way, and it is easier to make that call yourself with the incident already in front of you.
If you are reselling, the reports can carry your branding rather than ours. White labelling the reports covers what changes.
Test it before you need it
Add the contacts, then run a one-off test against a domain you are willing to break, or temporarily lower a threshold so a warning fires.
An misconfigured contact is silent until the night it matters. The one thing worse than no monitoring is monitoring you believe is running.