This week, Support Lead Helen Grimbly is outlining a list of checks to ensure you're obtaining the most from Sitemorse Global Heartbeat Monitoring of your sites - often set up to monitor your homepage or other key pages.

Review your settings 

View settings for a monitor by logging into Sitemorse, then from Digital Properties select 'Journeys & Monitoring' for a site, and click the Cog icon next to the title to view the settings.

Who receives the alerts? (Alert Recipients)

• Check if there are any email or text-message recipients that should be removed or added. 
• For each recipient, check the contact details are current, and check the Out of Hours (6pm to 8am) setting. Click the Cog icon to choose from "No alerts", "downtime only", or "downtime and slow response".

Setting the Response Thresholds for download of a webpage's HTML (Targets and Thresholds): 

Are you receiving a lot of alerts? 

• Are they slow response or downtime alerts? 
• View the history of alerts by selecting 'Journeys & Monitoring' for a monitored site, then 'Full Detail'. Here you can choose a time period to view charts and download monitoring statistics and events data.

Are common response times close to current thresholds? You might want to increase thresholds to reduce alerts. 

• 'Response Targets' has both a 'Home response target' for the local region (usually Europe) and a global 'Response target'.

Have you appropriate (optional) Content Checks? 

• 'Must contain': add a word or phrase that always appears in the page's HTML when it's working properly 
• 'Must not contain': add a word or phrase that appears when the page is not working properly (e.g. 'Server error').

Too many alert emails? If you would prefer to receive general updates on your monitors without immediate response alerts: 

• Remove (or pause) any alert recipients 
• Click 'My Account' in top banner of Sitemorse - to view a page with options to receive a 'daily', 'weekly', 'monthly' summary monitor emails. Daily are only sent if any alert criteria has been met from the previous day.  

Please note: the master user of each organisation has permissions to change all Alert Recipients, Targets & Thresholds. Other users can on request (and approval by master user). If you have any queries about the above, for users of Sitemorse - please submit a support request via "Need Help?' link in the top banner after login, or contact us.

This article has a related video.