We released a couple new improvements to the Knowledge Front interface and wanted to share some details with you.

Monitor Groups

Some of our clients keep a watchful eye on dozens of critical websites and email servers. We’ve added a new feature to the monitoring dashboard that lets you create Monitor Groups to help you sort through all of this real-time monitoring data.

Monitor Groups are just simple, logical groupings of Monitors that you’d like to group together for quick viewing and filtering on your dashboard.

Recently we updated our HTTP Monitor to support NTLM Authentication.

With this update it is now possible to monitor many types of Windows services such as Microsoft’s SharePoint. If there are any questions or requests for further enhancements let us know

On April 7th a severe security bug was disclosed in the OpenSSL library (CVE-2014-0160). After performing a comprehensive review of public facing services it has been determined that Knowledge Front does not use any version of OpenSSL with the Heartbleed vulnerability. We are also taking steps to refresh authentication tokens and passwords with our own service providers after confirming the vulnerability has been fixed on their services.

If there is anything we can do to help or any questions feel free to contact us:

If you are still using mail.global.frontbridge.com as your MX record in conjunction with any of the Microsoft hosted e-mail services such as FOPE (Forefront Online Protection for Exchange) it may be time to update to mail.messaging.microsoft.com

Recently we learned that one of the IP addresses backing the mail.global.frontbridge.com DNS record has stopped responding to network requests. Upon further investigation turns out this legacy DNS record is being deprecated and Microsoft asks everyone to use the newer mail.messaging.microsoft.com record.

Knowledge Front’s network monitoring service provides e-mail, SMS, and voice call alerting for your monitors… and it also hooks nicely into an alerting service like PagerDuty so that you can send alerts to your on-call technical staff.

(note: this guide assumes you’re already using both Knowledge Front and PagerDuty services.)

To start you’ll want to open up your web browser and load up a tab for your PagerDuty website and another for the Knowledge Front website… we’ll be flipping between the two a few times to get this integration rocking and tested.

A, CNAME, and PTR

The first generation of our DNS monitor did simple A record queries. Good enough to get the basic records necessary for life on the Internet, and quickly we had many requests to expand the types of records available. Based on these requests we have added CNAME and PTR records to the DNS monitoring roster.

Inspecting results

We have also added a new option for DNS monitoring.

In the next few days the web sites for Mailive! and Knowledge Front will receive major updates. We’re putting these updates in place to improve the usability of our monitoring services.

What’s better?

• Enhanced mobile and tablet support! We’re introducing a new responsive design for improved consistency across phones, tablets, and traditional browsers.
• Smaller and faster load times! Our philosophy is to make monitoring and alerting simple and reliable for you, so there’s not much extra eye candy to get in the way of the user experience.

What’s changed?

• Configuration and Settings menus have moved to the top.
• The redundant alert configuration page has been removed. For now. Since it was only a slightly different layout of the same information available under the Monitor Configuration it has been set aside for the moment. Future plans include bulk editing of alert settings at which time it will resurface.

As with any substantial change there may be a few issues that, even after months of testing, only come out in the real world. Let us know of any problems and we will fix them as fast as possible.

On Sunday April 14th, beginning at 3pm US/Central and lasting approximately 30 minutes, we will be performing database upgrades on the primary production databases. We have scheduled 30 minutes, but in testing the upgrades and the subsequent checkouts took very little time.

All services will be stopped during the database upgrade including the www.knowledgefront.com and www.mailive.com sites as well as monitoring and alerting. We will post status updates on our blog (http://weblog.knowledgefront.com) as well as our Twitter account (https://twitter.com/KnowledgeFront).

Last night (Feb 25th, 2013) around 5pm Central time Microsoft’s Forefront service FPE changed its security policies and began blocking most Mailive! test messages.

In the Forefront control panel it will be necessary to whitelist the sender mailive@knowledgefront.com or the IP Range where the test messages originate: 71.5.105.193 - 71.5.105.198 (netblock 71.5.105.192/29 or 71.5.105.192/255.255.255.248).

If there are any questions or problems feel free to contact us and we will help out any way we can.

Using Knowledge Front’s HTTP monitoring service is a simple, reliable and trusted way to externally monitor your websites. Our clients use the HTTP monitor to keep a close watch on their businesses’ websites hosted in a variety of environments:

• on-premise data centers
• 3rd party colocation sites
• PaaS providers such as Heroku and Google App Engine
• IaaS providers such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and Linode

Externally monitoring your websites provides insight into the responsiveness of your site from your customer’s perspective. The service provides the confidence in knowing that your support staff will immediately be notified of any service disruptions.

Help!

We’ve put gobs of hours in to making Knowledge Front’s tools easy to use and understand. We also put gobs of hours in to listening to our user base. And we’ve found…..we’re not perfect.

Shhhhh…..

So, we’ve finally launched a new library of Help Pages that is sure to improve usability. The new pages are:

• Formatted for the thinking person (i.e. easier to navigate)
• Searchable (pure genius!)
• Chock-full of new instructions (such as setup play-by-play with screenshots)
• Updated more frequently

From now on, if you can’t figure it out, check out our new Help Pages. The answer you’re looking for may actually be there.