This week, Helen Grimbly outlines some checks to perform if you are receiving slow monitor alerts via SMS or email.

Access the monitor detail page

• Login to Sitemorse and either select 'Digital Properties' link top left, then 'Journeys & Monitoring' for the site in question, then the 'Full Detail' link, or
• from the Dashboard, select the relevant monitor from the drop down, and select 'Full Detail' link. 
• By selecting the 'Full Detail' link you will be taken to the Heartbeat detail page for that monitor.

Is the page slow in every location? 

• Select the 'month' option at the top right of the page. 
• Then toggle all the region options near the top of the page, i.e. Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Oceania and Africa. Sitemorse has a monitoring station in each of those locations, which checks your page every 5 minutes. It checks the status code of the page returned (e.g. 200 is OK), and the response time of that page. 
• Scroll down the page to look at each location and see if the second circular 'Slow Response' chart has more orange on it in certain locations than others. Note if the first chart 'Downtime' has a lot of red and for example the page is timing out, then this would affect the response time, but here we are assuming there is little downtime, just slow response alerts. 
• On the charts that show a lot of orange slow response, also check the third bar chart to see what the average response times are at different times in that last month. 
• If the page is slow everywhere, then it could indicate that your server is slow. But if the page is slow in just one location it could be that the route between that location and your server is slow.

What to do if the page is slow in one or few locations

There are a few options: 

• Check the site in a day or two to see if the slow response has resolved in that area. If it's temporary it may not have been slow throughout that whole month in the charts. 
• If that location is not vital to your site services then you could switch off alerts from that location. To do this select 'Digital Properties' then 'Journeys & Monitoring' for the relevant monitor, then select the Cog icon next to the monitor name to view the Monitor Settings. Select 'Targets & Thresholds' tab, and near the bottom of the page under the heading 'Monitoring Continents', untick the location(s) that you do not need to monitor from. 
• If you would like the location to continue to be monitored, but only be alerted at a higher response threshold, go to the 'Response Targets' heading in the above Monitor Settings, and select a higher target time in ms (note 1 sec is 1000 ms response), and set the 'Report home response target' for your local region, and 'Report response target' for the global regions. To help decide what that threshold could be set to, check the response times in your monitor alert information (the email or SMS received), and the events at the bottom of the monitor detail page for that monitor.

What to do if all monitor locations are slow

If all the locations, over more than a week for example, are finding your site page to be slow then we recommend that you speak to your IT department to review whether to increase the capacity of your servers, and/or the capacity of internet connections to the servers. If your IT team need more information about the slow response times, please see the following article about how to download the heartbeat monitoring history, which they could be provided with: 
https://sitemorse.com/blog-article/9548/downloading-heartbeat-monitoring-history/

Also note, if you have many different site pages being monitored, then you can compare the monitor results from other sites to see if certain locations have been slow, or whether this is an issue to review with your servers.