Saturday, August 18, 2007

Monitor Your Monitoring System

Do you know if your monitoring system is really monitoring what it is supposed to be monitoring? Have you audited it? Do you have a way to be notified if it is doing the wrong thing?

In my case I found out my monitoring system at DataPipe was set up to monitor IP address, not the urls I had requested. The problem with this is while the monitoring system may show you that your server is up, it doesn't tell you if there is a DNS error that is disallowing people from accessing your site - or worse - sending them somewhere else via a man-in-the-middle DNS spoofing attack.

Monitor your monitoring systems. Audit your hosting company.