Monitoring your site to ensure that it is available and performant is a function at the core of every synthetic monitoring tool. Creating workflows and processes around distributing alerts when your site isn't performing is a challenge that every digital organization faces. Learn the ins and outs of Rigor alerts to make your site operations more seamless.

1. BEST PRACTICES FOR USING AND HANDLING RIGOR MONITORING ALERTS
Rigor Monitoring - Alerting Workflow

2. Table of Contents
o Account, Check, and Alert Configurations
o Check Failures
o Email, Text (SMS), Phone Alerts
o Responding to Uptime, Real Browser Check Alerts
o Real Browser Check – Waterfall Chart
o Check Failures – Common Causes
o Troubleshooting

3. account configuration – Users and groups
o Group/user preferences for alerts can be found under
Admin Tools > Users & Groups (Administrator only).
o Notification via Email/Phone/Text (SMS)
o Create alerting groups ( New > +Group )

4. Checks – basic settings
o Name:
o Check name
o URL:
o Starting URL for the check
o Notify:
o Choose User, Group, Alert Webhook, or
custom email to notify
o Criteria for notification
o Type of notification
o Time of the day to receive alerts
o Frequency:
o How often to run the test
o Turn on/off notifications
o Pause/resume a check

5. Check – Configuring Escalations
o In some cases we may want to escalate alerts to other users,
groups, or systems if the initial alert to the primary user goes
unacknowledged.
More on Escalations here: http://help.rigor.com/how-to/escalations.html

6. Checks – Advanced Alerting settings
o Response Time Monitor:
o Edit Check > Advanced >
Response Time Monitor
o Value in milliseconds (default
120s)
o Threshold Monitor:
o Edit Check > Advanced >
+Add Threshold Monitor
More information here: http://help.rigor.com/best-practices/response-time-monitor.html

7. Check failures – Configuring notifications
o Basic notifications can be configured in 2 places:
o User Profile*: https://monitoring.rigor.com/settings/edit
o Edit Check > Notify
* If delivery option is not enabled on User Profile, check
will not deliver alerts for that delivery option.
o Advanced notification configuration (see next slide)
Basic Notifications:
o Email
o Text (SMS)
o Phone

8. Check failures – Configuring notifications (cont.)
o Alert Webhooks can be found under Admin > Alert Webhooks
(Administrator only).
More on Alert Webhooks here: http://help.rigor.com/how-to/alert-webhooks.html
o Alert Webhook delivery must be configured in 2 places:
o Admin Menu: https://monitoring.rigor.com/admin/alert_webhooks
o Edit Check > Notify

9. Email Alerts
o Check failures can trigger email alerts:
o To acknowledge the alert, click on the “Alert
Information” link to see details about the failure.
o To view previous runs for the check, click on the
“Check History” link
o Additional information included in email
alerts:
o Reason for failure
o Check URL
o Who was notified
o Check run timestamp
o Check run location

10. Text (SMS) Alerts
o Check failures can be configured to trigger Text
(SMS) alerts
o Information included in Text (SMS) alerts:
1. Check Name
2. Location(s)
3. Response Time
4. Check URL
o Click check URL to view check details

11. Phone Alerts
o Check failures can be configured to trigger
phone call alerts
o Information included in Phone alerts (audio):
1. Check Name
2. Status
3. Instructions to login/take ownership
o Log into app and view Alerts Dashboard for
details

12. Responding to Uptime Check Alerts
Email
Alert Check
Run
Summary Alert
Diagnostics
Click on “Alert Information” link to view
Check Run Summary and Alert Diagnostics

13. Responding to Uptime Alerts (Cont.)
cURL Request
Output
Request
Headers
Response Body
Response
Headers

14. Responding to API Check Alerts
Email
Alert Check
Run
Summary Alert
Diagnostics
Click on “Alert Information” link to view
Check Run Summary and Alert Diagnostics

15. Responding to API Check Alerts (Cont.)
cURL Request
Output
Request
Headers
Response Body
Response
Headers

16. Responding to Real Browser Check Alerts
Email
Alert Check
Run
Summary Alert
Diagnostics
Click on “Alert Information” link
to view Check Run Summary
and Alert Diagnostics
Click on “URL” to view
Waterfall Chart
Click to view
HTML source
code

17. Real browser check - waterfall chart
o Helpful to identify certain
URLs or resources that may
be triggering the failure.
o For more information:
http://rigor.com/blog/2014/
12/read-waterfall-chart
o For each run, you can access
the waterfall chart for each
visited URL by clicking on it.

18. check failures - common causes
Server
errors
Render
errors
Load
timeout
Location-specific
errors
Other errors

19. Troubleshooting – things to look out for
o For server errors, when looking through server logs, look out for:
o Rigor User-Agent (Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0; Rigor) Gecko/20130331 Firefox/31.0)
o Rigor Monitoring Network: https://monitoring.rigor.com/hubs
o For render errors
o Ensure that correct CSS/Xpath/id selectors are used
o This can be done by searching for that selector in Chrome Developer Tools
o The selector should return a unique element
o For load timeouts
o Look for red text, long blocks, and large gaps between requests in the waterfall chart.
o Check to see if it is location-specific, and if it only affects a particular region.

20. Additional Information and Best Practices
Appendix

21. Checks – Advanced Real Browser Check settings
o Monitoring Locations
o http://help.rigor.com/learn-more/locations.html
o Tags: organize similar checks or create dashboards to compare and
contrast performance of specific checks.
o http://help.rigor.com/learn-more/tags.html
More advanced settings here: http://http://help.rigor.com/learn-more/advanced-real-browser-settings.html
o Escalations: Specify domains/files to avoid requesting when running the
check.
o http://help.rigor.com/how-to/exclude-files.html

22. Real browser check– Metrics
o Server Time: Time taken for the server to respond to the initial request.
o Render Time: Time taken for the user to see the website.
o Response Time:
o For single-page tests, Response Time = Load Time = Onload event.
o For multi-page tests, Response Time = sum of page Load Times.
o Page Size: Total size of all files on the page.
o Requests: Number of requests made to load the page.
o Errors: Client/Server/Connection errors that were fired during page load.

23. Uptime check – Metrics
o Response Time: Time taken for the server to respond to the initial request.
o Time to First Byte: Time taken for the server to prepare the response
o DNS Time: Time taken for the DNS to resolve to an IP address

24. API Check – Metrics
o Response Time: Time taken for the server to process requests across API Check flow

25. Checks - overview
o Monitors user experience around a single
page or a multi-step performance flow.
o Pings a URL and monitors the response
time and the response code.
o Monitors the uptime and the response
of an API endpoint to a request.
o Compares the page performance of
competitors to your page performance.
o Scans a page or sitemap for availability
of links, CSS, and scripts.
For more information, please visit: http://help.rigor.com/

26. Rigor support
o Rigor Help Resources: help.rigor.com
o Contact us through our in-app support channel
o Click on the ? in the bottom right corner
o Ask us anything
o Email support@rigor.com
For more information, please visit : http://help.rigor.com/how-to/contact-rigor-support.html