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Monitoring changes to subsites in general and after updates

The issue here is not that the site goes down, as Uptime monitors the MU installation, but the site “breaking” and the styling and content have gone bad.
I am having the same issues on all my networks. I notice it by chance or often a client contacts me in dispear.
Clients are wondering if the monitoring and maintanence they pay for should not detect this, and why they have to tell me this every timer their site breaks.. I understand them.

When I use Automate, the service checks the main site (and up to 5 pages of the main site) if there are any changes to the site after the update. If the changes are more than a set %, I get an email as a warning that the site is “down”. I know i could revert to manually updating all sites, then checking all subsites manually, but that is not very automated :wink:
Why can’t the Automate checking also check the homepage of all subsites and send a report if any of those show significant changes. And this functionality in Automate, to “visually” check for changes, would be a great feature for constantly monitoring changes to styles/content on any page added to the Hub.

So two feature requests from my part!
– Automate also checks subsites after updating
– Uptime is given the functionality of the Automate site checker and monitors sites also for visible changes.

Best regards,

Ralph

Mon, 9 Nov 2020 12:05:28
  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Ralph

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your feedback!

    As for Automate, let me just make sure first before I’ll take it to our Hub team:

    What you suggest is that if the site is a Multisite installation Automate should “out of the box” (by default, on its own) detect all existing sub-sites of it and run that “visual” check on them, right? Or is it that you’d just want to be able to add more/unlimited number of pages to the check?

    As for Uptime, it’s a bit different thing. Uptime is sending a lot of requests to every monitored site. It’s checking site every 2 minutes so that makes it 24 hours * 30 checks/hour = 720 requests a day per monitored site.

    That’s “at least” because when the site goes down, it starts to check it a bit more often to detect when it’s up as fast as possible.

    These requests are requests for HTTP headers only as HTTP status is all that’s needed to find out whether the site is available or not and fetching entire site would cause a lot of additional load of site/server, on both ends – yours and ours.

    Taking screenshots for comparison upon each request would cause even more load and even regular (as it currently is) can sometimes be a bit too much for some hosts to handle. On multisite, especially with multiple sub-sites, the number of these requests – so also load on server – would grow a lot if there were screenshots of each sub-site taken.

    Taking that into account, I think it’s something that would be very handy and useful but it’s quite likely that in many cases (if not most) it wouldn’t really work well.

    I’m thinking that maybe some sort of a “partial” solution could work then? Like, for example, instead of adding that “visual check” upon each uptime check, maybe e.g. being able to schedule it (e.g. once a week or once a day) could work better?

    What do you think?

    Best regards,
    Adam

  • Ralph
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    Hi Adam.
    Thanks for your in-depth answer.

    For the Automate, it would be great if it detected all subsites (not the ones we exclude, as they might be under dev). For me, the main site would be good enough for each subsite, but fantastic if it could handle several pages also on subsites..

    Everything else I agree upon and understand the issues.
    And this would be great:
    I’m thinking that maybe some sort of a “partial” solution could work then? Like, for example, instead of adding that “visual check” upon each uptime check, maybe e.g. being able to schedule it (e.g. once a week or once a day) could work better?

    Maybe a bit more often then once a week, but this in itself would be a huge improvement :slight_smile:

    At the moment I am checking out this service (https://www.wachete.com/), as a possible soloution, but would really prefer to have it on the wpmu dev platform. Even if there was an extra cost (for increased loads, bandwith etc..)

    Ralph :slight_smile:

    • Ralph
      • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

      Just so not to confuse:

      For the Automate, it would be great if it detected all subsites (not the ones we exclude, as they might be under dev). For me, the main site would be good enough for each subsite, but fantastic if it could handle several pages also on subsites..

      Main site = home page

      Ralph :slight_smile:

  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Ralph

    Thanks for response!

    I think there’s still a chance that such solutions might result in some performance issues in a long-run (e.g. putting too much load/stress on target sites/servers) but I suppose there can be some “middle ground” found to balance it.

    However, not being a developers I can’t say for sure so now having some “shape” of the feature established here, let me pass that over to relevant developers’ teams so they’d look into possible options/ways to achieve this and implement in future.

    Thanks again for your feedback! Some points are also already flying your way… :wink:

    Best regards,
    Adam