Setting up web endpoint monitoring in Azure.

Services like Pingdom allow you to monitor your websites in case they go down so that you are notified. When the configured endpoint for monitoring returns a HTTP response code greater than or equal to 400 or if the response takes longer than 30 seconds etc, you will be alerted.

The service will periodically call your website URL that you have configured, to ensure you get notified before your angry customers notify you.

You can also do this from within Azure.

If you select your website and view your dashboard, underneath the graph you will see “Web endpoint status”.

You can see here it currently says “You have not configured a web endpoint for monitoring.”

Click on “CONFIGURE WEB ENDPOINT MONITORING” and it takes you to the general settings page, scroll down until you get to the monitoring section.

You can setup 2 endpoints. If you click on the test location drop down you can see that you can set the monitoring from any of the Azure data centres, as you can see I’ve selected the top 2, “US: IL-Chicago” and “NL: Amsterdam”. You can change this to only be the data centre that your website is located, or do more than one, or ONLY ping from a data centre further a field.

Give it a name, and then click “Save” right at the bottom of the settings page. After a few seconds if you go to your dashboard you will see your endpoint monitoring is configured.