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Ping Monitor ​

Ping monitor checks, allowing you to see the load time and response size for every run.

"Availability" (or "Ping") monitors check to see if an application is online. They usually use a simple HTTP client to make requests to the site. For consistency with other synthetic monitor types, New Relic uses Google Chrome user agent. However, the HTTP client is not a full browser, and it does not execute JavaScript.

In our case, we use New Relic pings to https://ixdf.org/about/terms-of-use page (as one of the simplest pages).

What can affect general site availability:

  • DigitalOcean network issues (NY3 datacenter)
  • Global issues with the Internet (very rare event)
  • Load Balancer and Firewall on it
  • Other unknown issues

Plan ​

Often, ping monitor alerts are caused by network issues.

False positives ​

A single-location failure for a short time (<5min) is almost always a false positive (e.g., New Relic probe maintenance, transient DNS resolution). You can safely ignore it.

Real incidents ​

If the alert persists for >5min or fires from multiple locations, investigate:

The next step depends on what you find. Typical actions:

  • Check if the Load Balancer is healthy
  • Check if the app process (PHP-FPM) is healthy (e.g., systemctl status php-fpm)
  • Check nginx status (e.g., systemctl status nginx)
  • Escalate via Slack #dev if the root cause is unclear

Expected healthy response ​

A healthy ping returns HTTP 200 with a response time typically under 500ms. If you see 200s but with high latency (>2s), that's a performance issue, not an availability issue — check PHP-FPM worker saturation and database load.