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| If the following information does not answer your question please contact support. |
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| General Questions |
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What can isITon do for me? |
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How does it work? |
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How do I know that it works? |
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What do I need to do to my server to get isITon to work? |
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What type of servers can you test for me? |
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What exactly is being tested for me? |
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How often do you check my server? |
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How will isITon tell me that my server has crashed? |
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What benefits will knowing my site's response time give me in dealing with my Web Hosting company? |
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I am concerned about someone hacking my web site. Can you help? |
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Is your service guaranteed? |
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| Technical Questions |
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Do I need a dedicated connection to isITon to use your services? |
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I can monitor my own servers locally. Why do I need isITon? |
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I don't want isITon to affect my web site statistics, what can I do? |
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How can isITon monitor devices on my network through my firewall? Is this a security risk? |
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Do you really check that my web services are working properly or do you just "ping" my site? |
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My site is secured. Can it still be monitored? |
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| What can isITon do for me? |
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| isITon provides an objective method of testing your Web server performance. It shows you how long it takes your Web server to respond to requests. We also inform you when major errors are encountered, such as pages not found, servers not responding, or Internet routing errors. Being notified that your site is unavailable to your customers - as seen from the Internet - allows you to begin troubleshooting before your customers call you. |
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| How does it work? |
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| We have developed software that is generally referred to as a "robot". Our robot checks your site regularly and will notify you (via e-mail, mobile/cell phone or pager) whenever it detects a problem. We also log the results (including response times) and make those logs available to you. |
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| How do I know that it works? |
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| Try it! We stand behind our product with a 30-day Money Back Guarantee. If for any reason you are not happy we will gladly provide a full refund excluding the cost of any pager and SMS messages we have sent to you - just contact support. If you are monitoring a web server you should see isITon entries in your log files every 15 minutes. If you are using a firewall your firewall software should be able to display incoming isITon connections. |
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| What do I need to do to my server to get isITon to work? |
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| The answer is easy - nothing! isITon connects to your server just as any other machine on the Internet would. |
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| What type of servers can you test for me? |
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| isITon can potentially monitor any Internet device. Currently we monitor: |
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Web servers |
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Secure Web servers |
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File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers |
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Email Services (smtp, pop and imap) |
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Domain Naming System (DNS) Servers |
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| In the near future isITon will be offering monitoring services for: |
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Directory Servers (ldap only) |
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Gopher servers |
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News servers |
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Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers |
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Most other network devices including custom made ones |
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| For Web servers, isITon can also monitor the contents of the Web pages, files, back-end databases, or CGI results they serve. |
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| What exactly is being tested for me? |
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| We test the availability and relative performance of the server that is hosting your site and of the connection from our dedicated servers to your site. |
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| How often do you check my server? |
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| Currently isITon checks your server every 15 minutes. We believe this is the optimal interval between tests, but we welcome any feedback regarding this issue. Please email sales@forestknoll.com with your comments. |
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| How will isITon tell me that my server has crashed? |
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If isITon receives no response from your Web server you will be notified immediately by e-mail or pager or cell/mobile phone. The fault will also be noted in your log file which can be viewed at any time.
isITon can send messages to most cell/mobile phones and pagers throughout the world, please look at the paging support list to see if your device is supported.
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| What benefits will knowing my site's response time give me in dealing with my Web Hosting company? |
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| A site that is slow or frequently inaccessible is likely to lose you business and destroy customer loyalty. By understanding your servers performance you can more rigorously evaluate your Web Hosting company or internal server arrangements. |
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| I'm concerned about someone hacking my web site. Can you help? |
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| Yes! We can detect changes to the size of files and whether certain keywords in the files have been deleted or changed. If anything that we are monitoring has been tampered with we'll let you know immediately. If your requirements are more complex and you wish us to help you with Intrusion detection please contact sales@forestknoll.com |
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| Is your service guaranteed? |
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| Yes. The isITon monitoring service carries a 30 day money back guarantee. If you are not completely satisfied with our services within the first 30 days of service, you will be given a full refund excluding the cost of any pager and SMS messages we have sent to you - just contact support |
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| Do I need a dedicated connection to isITon to use your services? |
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| No. isITon uses the Internet to reach your web device. If you have an Internet connection, you do not need any additional hardware, software or network connections. |
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| I can monitor my own servers locally. Why do I need isITon? |
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| isITon does more than monitor the up/down status of a device. Individual services (SMTP, DNS, HTTP, etc) are checked with the appropriate protocol to ensure the service itself is responding properly. Most importantly, isITon tells you if your services are really available to your customers because we check their responsiveness via your Internet connection - from your customers' perspective. You will always know with certainty that mail is deliverable, that your DNS server is resolving and that your web site is serving pages. |
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| I do not want isITon to affect my web site statistics, what can I do? |
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| When isITon connects to your web site it sets the User-Agent to www.forestknoll.com. By excluding these from your report criteria when you run your statistics program you should be able to get true statistics. |
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| How can isITon monitor devices on my network through my firewall? Is this a security risk? |
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| Some firewalls have the ability to securely pass the types of data isITon uses to monitor your systems (SNMP, ICMP, etc). But even for those that don't, security risks are minimal. Monitoring is done from a secure network. By knowing the IP addresses of isITon's monitoring servers, it is possible to configure your firewalls and routers to allow isITon to monitor your intranet servers without leaving them exposed to the security risks of the general internet. |
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| Do you really check that my web services are working properly or do you just "ping" my site? |
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| We do much more than "ping". We speak the protocol of the monitored server and issue commands designed to test that the server is working properly. As a last resort we issue a ping just to see if the device is still "alive". Note that if the first test fails we perform a second and third test. If all tests fail we record an error and generate an alert. |
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| My site is secured. Can it still be monitored? |
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| Yes. We can also retrieve a secured web page or ftp file if the username and password have been provided. |
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