When monitoring the uptime of Files.com yourself, it's important to follow best practices that not only ensure meaningful results but also prevent the inadvertent triggering of security rules that could give you a false impression of downtime. For customers that rely on uptime monitoring tools, it is crucial to understand how to set up monitoring in a way that reflects actual service availability, while remaining compatible with security controls.

Files.com Self-Monitoring and Incident Management

We at Files.com take the reliability of our platform seriously. We actively monitor the health of our own services through a sophisticated monitoring system. Our Incident Management Program is designed to quickly identify and respond to any issues that could impact the platform’s performance. This means that, in most cases, you don’t need to worry about independently monitoring Files.com for basic uptime. We have built-in, automated systems to handle this task on your behalf, ensuring that any issues are detected and resolved as swiftly as possible. Any issues that are detected are presented on our service status page, which shows the status of 15 services within the Files.com platform.

In addition to this, we provide a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) integration that delivers near real-time logging and activity data. This SIEM feed is a powerful tool for detecting outages or irregularities and can notify you promptly if there’s a service disruption affecting your usage of Files.com. For those with an existing SIEM system, this can be a valuable addition to your internal monitoring process.

Ping-Based Monitoring Falls Short

Some customers turn to third-party uptime monitoring tools or similar services that ping a subdomain or check open network ports. Relying on this method can lead to misleading or incomplete insights. A basic ping check does not offer meaningful information about the operational status of the Files.com platform. Instead, all it tells you is whether one of the services in the region hosting the uptime monitoring service is responding to a ping. This will not give you any clarity on whether your actual business use case—such as file transfers, remote syncs, automations, or web portal functionality—is operational.

Additionally, tools that rely solely on pinging and port-checking are often blocked by our security rules, leading to false negatives and the mistaken belief that Files.com is down. These tools do not take into account the many micro-services that make up the Files.com platform, each of which may be independently responsible for different features and capabilities. Like many other cloud services, Files.com is built using a resilient, micro-service architecture. Even if one service is down, it does not necessarily mean that services used for your site are affected.

Recommended Approach: Mimicking Actual Usage

To ensure that you are receiving accurate uptime information, it’s best to use a monitoring solution that closely mirrors how you interact with Files.com in your day-to-day operations. For example, instead of simply pinging Files.com or testing an open port, a far more meaningful test would be to simulate actual system and user behavior, such as logging into the platform and using the features which you've implemented in your Files.com site. This approach checks the actual services and features that you rely on, ensuring that the monitoring accurately reflects the availability of the platform from your perspective.

In practical terms, this means running tests such as performing transfers or issuing API requests, rather than simply opening a network socket. These tests will provide much more valuable insights into whether the features and capabilities critical to your use case are functioning properly.

Leveraging the Files.com SDKs or APIs

The easiest and most reliable method of mimicking usage is to use our SDKs or APIs to programmatically monitor the uptime and health of the micro-services you depend on. By querying the exact services or endpoints that align with your specific usage, you can retrieve detailed logs and look for errors that might indicate issues with the platform. This approach allows you to fine-tune your monitoring to focus on the aspects of Files.com that are most relevant to your business operations, providing much more actionable data compared to basic ping checks.

With our SDKs, you can integrate real-time monitoring directly into your workflow, automate error detection, and trigger notifications when issues arise. This provides a more granular level of insight into the platform’s health, allowing you to respond quickly if there are disruptions that impact your specific services.

For example, if your workflow relies on the Remote Sync feature to exchange data with your external partners, you can use our SDKs or APIs to query the logs to observe successful activity or failure error messages.

Using Child Sites for Monitoring

For customers who need to monitor Files.com functionality without interfering with the logs of their main site, child sites provide a great solution. By setting up a dedicated child site for monitoring purposes, you can isolate your monitoring activity from the primary system, ensuring that monitoring traffic doesn’t pollute the main site’s logs or cause unnecessary alerts. This allows you to maintain clear and actionable logs for real-time activity without interference from the monitoring process.

Using a child site also ensures that monitoring calls are directed to a dedicated system that is designed for such activities. This is especially important in avoiding the possibility of having legitimate monitoring requests flagged as suspicious or triggering security rules that could inadvertently block important activity on your main site.

When to Rethink Monitoring

Before implementing any third-party monitoring system, consider whether you truly need to monitor Files.com at all. As mentioned, we have a comprehensive internal monitoring program in place, supported by a rapid Incident Management Program that responds to issues as they arise. We continuously monitor the platform with far more sophistication than most third-party tools are capable of, which means that, in many cases, external monitoring is unnecessary. Instead of adding complexity to your operations, it may be worth reconsidering whether the built-in monitoring services that Files.com offers can fulfill your needs.

Conclusion

While monitoring the availability of cloud services like Files.com is important, it’s essential to do so in a way that’s both meaningful and cognizant of security measures. Rather than relying on tools that only check network pings or ports, use methods that mimic real site behavior, such as transfers, syncs, automations, or other used features. By leveraging Files.com’s SDKs, APIs, and SIEM integrations, you can gain the most relevant, actionable insights into the uptime of the services you rely on. By using child sites, you can isolate your monitoring activity from the core platform, ensuring cleaner logs and fewer false positives.

Ultimately, Files.com has robust monitoring practices already in place, and our advanced monitoring capabilities mean you can trust us to keep your service available and responsive—while you focus on your business.