We have just released a terrific new feature for testing whether your WAN link (or public facing Web site) is up or down. (And it can also be used to monitor your Amazon EC2 instances, but that is a story for another day.)

This functionality gives us a platform to do more sophisticated infrastructure testing from the cloud. We are going to describe how to get started with the WAN link up/down test and Alert feature here and will talk more about the other capabilities in the near future.

To create a Paglo alert to notify you when your internet connection has gone down you go to the ‘My Paglo home page’ which you get to by clicking on the ‘Home’ tab in the left navigation bar.

In the box titled ‘Created Alerts’ the ‘Internet is down’ alert now has a text field next to it when you enable it. In to this text field you need to put the external IP address of your router. By default it will be filled in with the IP address that Paglo sees that you are coming from. You need to enter the external IP address of your network’s router so that Paglo knows what specifically to check for connectivity.

How does this work?
Paglo now has a Cloud Based Crawler that runs out of our data center. It is just like the Paglo Crawler you have installed on your local network except that it does not do network scans and discovery. All it does is run a subset of the Paglo Crawler plugins. It runs the Service Health Check plugin and the Amazon CloudWatch plugin.

When you create the Internet is down alert via the My Paglo ‘Create Alerts’ page we will create a Cloud Based Crawler for you, configure it to probe the IP address you gave when you created the alert using the Service Health Check plugin, and set up an alert to notify you when that IP address is no longer reachable from our data center.

The device with the IP address you entered will also show up in the Server Health application in its default configuration. This is because we will identify that device as a router.

So now you can have both health and performance monitoring behind the firewall and testing from the Internet to your web facing infrastructure. Go at it and let us know what you think of this extension to our IT Management SaaS platform.