Monitors

Usage limits apply and are determined by your plan

How does monitoring work?

Monitors are used to watch for changes in your data and signal when a specified state or threshold is matched. Pro and Enterprise users can even provide scripts for even more in-depth control over monitors.

Depending on how you configure a monitor, you can choose whether the status roll up returns a red, amber or green color to the tile.

The status of the tile will then automatically roll up to the dashboard, and to the workspace. So if a tile turns red, so does the dashboard and workspace. See RollUp.

The red, amber or green status indicators mean you can instantly see if everything is okay or if something needs your attention.

Once your monitor is configured, SquaredUp can alert you when its state changes by sending notifications.

Overview video

This short video (2 mins 40) shows how to enable monitoring for a tile and add a new notification rule:

Monitor errors

If a monitor evaluation fails because of an error (such as a timeout), its state would normally change to unknown and the tile would turn gray.

To prevent temporary evaluation failures from causing the monitor status to fluctuate, SquaredUp continues to use the monitor's last known state for a limited number of consecutive failures before changing it to unknown.

By default, the last known state is retained for:

  • Two consecutive failures for monitors that run every 30 minutes or more frequently.
  • One failure for monitors that run every hour or less frequently.

This behavior also applies when calculating health rollups for dashboards and workspaces.

Notifications use a separate threshold. A monitor must fail to evaluate five consecutive times before notifications can be triggered. This means that intermittent failures, such as occasional timeouts, do not trigger notifications unless they occur five times in a row.

Where can I see an overview of my monitoring?

There is a Monitors page within the workspace, that anyone with access to the workspace can view. There is also a Monitors page in Settings, which only admins can access.

Workspace monitors page

Within the workspace you can go to the Monitors tab on the left-hand side to see which dashboards and tiles in this workspace have monitoring activated.

This workspace Monitors page shows a table of monitors configured in this workspace, their current state, last and next evaluation times, and details of the last state change.

Click Edit monitor

next to a monitor to change how often it runs.To rename a monitor or change what it evaluates, edit it from the dashboard tile's Monitoring tab.

Click Delete monitor

to permanently delete a monitor. This removes the monitor only, the dashboard tile it was on is not affected.

Settings > Monitors page

The Settings > Monitors page shows every monitor across your organization, not just the current workspace. This page is only visible to admins.

The table shows the name of the tile that has a monitor configured (which links to the dashboard that the tile is on), its path (the workspace and dashboard), when it was last and will next be evaluated, and how often it runs.

Click Edit monitor

next to a monitor to change how often it runs.To rename a monitor or change what it evaluates, edit it from the dashboard tile's Monitoring tab.

Click Delete monitor

to permanently delete a monitor. This removes the monitor only, the dashboard tile it was on is not affected.

Configuring monitors

Monitoring is configured on a tile level, which means you can add monitoring to any tile on a dashboard. When you're editing a tile the Monitoring tab, on the right of the screen, lets you switch on and configure monitoring.

Monitoring can be based on a state (for objects that come with a state property), a threshold (like "if there are more than 10 new tickets in the last 24 hours switch the status to red"), or a monitor condition script.

The Preview box shows the tile's state color and value for the current configuration while you are changing settings.

Monitor settings

state
Select a state field from the tile to determine the monitor status.
threshold
This allows you to configure monitoring for yourself based on threshold levels you determine, for example, over 5 show as Error.
script
Use your own custom script to determine the monitoring status. See Scripts.

This feature is available with a Pro or Enterprise plan

State monitors

Column
Select the column that contains the state information. This will use a state field from the tile to determine the monitoring status and convert it into one of 3 levels: Success, Warning or Error.
Advanced:
Frequency
How often (in minutes) you want the data to be checked for changes.

Threshold monitors

Value
Select the value to monitor:
  • Top: Uses the latest data point (i.e the top value)
  • Sum: Adds the data points together
  • Mean: The average of the data points
  • Count: The total number of data points
Timeframe
The time period for which to aggregate data.
Evaluate by
Select a column to calculate a health state for each unique value in that column. A default column is selected based upon the available data.
Select None to perform the monitor calculation for the entire data set.
Column
The data column that will determine the threshold.
Conditions:
Error
Warning
For example, for Pingdom you might set Error to greater than 700, and the status will show as red when the Average Response is greater than 700ms.
Advanced:
Frequency
How often (in minutes) you want the data to be checked for changes.

Was this article helpful?


Have more questions or facing an issue?