New Feature: Error Codes in Emails
Posted on January 21st, 2009 by Chris Coyier
I’m pretty pumped about this one. Not only have we been toiling away at the backend continuing to make it as smart and stable as we can, we’ve also been working on some new features for ya’ll. Read on for the details.
Before when you got a site notification email from us, it would say something like this:
Your website at http://creativesuitehelp.com is down, and the internet is just a little bit lonelier without it. Would you mind checking on it, please?
That’s the bottom line, of course, but it doesn’t quite help you know what is the problem. What could be even more frustrating is if you clicked and went to your site right away and saw that it was responding fine and dandy. The fact is, we aren’t lying to you =). When we checked the site it really truly was erroring somehow. Some sites/hosts just go down for very short lengths of time.
In order to be a bit more helpful with those emails, we now include the actual error message that triggered the alert. Now the email is like this:
Your website at http://creativesuitehelp.com returned a 403 error when we checked it just a moment ago. Would you mind checking on it, please? The internet is just a little bit lonelier without it.
Learn more about status code 403:
http://blog.aremysitesup.com/status-codes/#403
A 403 error is a “Forbidden” error. This means your server didn’t find anything to serve up to you in the root directory (missing an index file?) and that it is configured to not allow you to see bare directories. Being able to see this error code, whatever it may be, should help you understand why your server is down and what you can do about it.
The other possibility, that we have been seeing a lot of, is “Timeout” errors. This can be caused by any number of things, one example being that your site is under a very large traffic load and can’t respond quickly. If your site Times out, we will mark it as down, but the email will tell you such.
Let us know what you think!
Chris & Co.,
This sounds very promising. It’s all about the little things. Thanks!
Sweet. I am excited.
Maybe for the next update, you guys could save a log of errors, with date / time? so i can see that my site XYZ was last down Dec. 12, 2008, etc. Maybe?
Some kind of statistics is possible in the future, but I’m not sure how yet. One of the goals is to give you some options with RSS, so you could potentially build your system for logging reports.
That’s a great addition. I just signed up and am looking forward to seeing how this develops.
The problem I’ve noticed is that I keep getting messages saying there is a problem and the error is 200. But 200 is good… it means there was a response… so why are you altering me that the site is responding “200 ok”?
I’m also still getting a lot of messages saying that my site is down when it isn’t.
-Jon
I got a few of those last night too when we rolled out a fix. Hopefully that won’t be a problem again. If you see it again starting now or later, definitely let me know.
I’m still getting messages saying one of my sites returned a 200 “error”
It is the same site each time, and the other sites I have in the system don’t do the same thing.
Cool feature! Now that you’re capturing this could you also show (online) a list of recent up/down activity with status codes? What about in .xls or other useful formats??