Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimise your site on various fronts: traffic, development and user experience amongst others. There is one feature however which I feel is critical: Jetpack Monitor. Simply put, Jetpack Monitor keeps tabs on your site and alerts you the moment that downtime is detected.
Like a lot of people who work in web, before I joined the Jetpack team I did quite a bit of client work: both freelance and at agencies. For me the absolute worst thing in this business is receiving a call from a client, most likely while you’re relaxing on a beach or just waking up, desperately asking you to fix her site because she’s losing money, clients or brand value while her site is down.
Jetpack Monitor might not do away with the frantic scrabbling you’ll need to do to fix the site but it will put you back in the driving seat. Because you get notified first you can turn the tables around and call your client yourself, calmly saying “Hey, as I’ve been keeping tabs on your site I noticed it just went down 10 seconds ago. Don’t panic, I’m on it.” At times the problem might even be a trivial one meaning that you can actually call your client and say that its already sorted!
Of course the same applies if you maintain your own site. You’ll get notified by us rather than by one of readers (or customers) making it more likely you can fix the problem before it affects too many of your users.
That’s it. With Jetpack Monitor, if your site goes down, you’ll hear it from us first.
Its entirely likely, indeed desirable, that you will turn this feature on when you install Jetpack and then never think about it again. But if, for whatever reason, your site or your client’s site does go down you will be thanking your lucky stars this feature is enabled.
Try Jetpack for yourself by connecting it to your site or by downloading the plugin files directly if you prefer that route. Oh, and do let us know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions.
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Yes. This is what I like WordPress. Jetpack Monitor is simply rocks. and it is completely Free. All Wows and Awws goes only to WordPress 🙂
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I just love the monitor part of jetpack, use on each and every page i own or manage. It really works, i can tell as one of the pages i manage is on crappy hosting and i keep getting emails from the monitor 🙂
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I’ve been using Jetpack monitor for some time. I received notices of it going down and back up again. When I contact the host to find out what’s up, I receive the reply “we don’t see anything going on.” I’ve pestered them with queries from time to time and the down events do seem to have diminished. JAC
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I am using Jetpack on two sites. I like the combo of features within one plugin and I particularly like the Markdown option. And I found a bug that you are looking into 🙂
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Nice feature, of course I enabled it!
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I use it, it’s brilliantly handy so I can step on the toes of my service provider
Well done for giving us this plugin MJG
Sent from my iPhone Mobile:- +44 7889 151 757 martin.gallagher@crisilience.com Twitter: @crisilience @crisilienceJobs @crisilienceEdu Skype:- gallagherm Quod erat demonstrandum Quod erat faciendum
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I had to turn OFF Monitor on the one site I was running it on … Why? It was reporting my site down multiple times a day. And it wasn’t. This happened repeatedly EVERY day. I thought this was going to be a great asset (and BTW, I *REALLY* like Jetpack). I’m not sure the algorithm used is correct. My hosting company is not afraid to show their up/down times because they are SO good. I’ve checked after the MONITOR reported site down — now site up — nope it’s down — nope it’s up… and nothing was displayed. I *love* the idea of MONITOR. But I’m not sure it’s ready for prime-time use yet.
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Jetpack Monitor checks your site every five minutes to see if it is accessible. If your site takes more than 10 seconds to load, it could trigger a notice that your site is down even if it’s not actually down. That’s most likely what’s happening here.
Do you use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache on your site? If not, I’d suggest giving it a try. If it improves your site’s loading time, you’ll stop receiving Monitor emails if that was what caused the reported downtime in the first place.
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I’m running Quick Cache. I’ll look into the plugin you mentioned. And thanks for letting me know (and anyone else) what was causing this.
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Do let us know if you see an improvement or not? 🙂
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log using the jetpack monitor and sharing system to google+ 😉
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Yep, it’s a great feature 🙂
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I like the ability of linking one’s wp pages and jetpack ‘s single login features. How about adding a captcha feature to this, thus adding security.
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If you’d like to add another security layer to Jetpack’s Single Sign On module, you can add the
jetpack_sso_bypass_login_forward_wpcomfilter to forward all logins to WordPress.com.You can read more about it at the bottom of this page:
http://jetpack.me/support/sso/
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