Ping and Http test of destination with multiple IP addresses

[wacl_itstaff]

We have recently moved our website to an external company. We have setup an http test to a couple important URL's to ensure that they are available. Unfortunately, this test will fail occasionally because the site may not respond on the IP addresses that I assume AHM received when it did a DNS lookup (DNS round-robin). The provider has stated that they will almost always have at least one of those addresses that won't respond. As such, our test fails occasionally even though the website is responding well on another address.

I thought I could create a master ping test to only fail if all IP's aren't responding but that won't resolve the fact that the HTTP test could be testing a failed IP. Any thoughts?

Is there a way to tell the test, upon failure, to do another lookup for that host (Hopefully grabbing another address)?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

[KS-Soft]

HostMonitor does not store DNS cashe. If DNS server returns wrong IP, test will fail but the same may happen when your clients will try to visit your web site.

The provider has stated that they will almost always have at least one of those addresses that won't respond

May be I misunderstood the problem but I think you should change provider.

As such, our test fails occasionally even though the website is responding well on another address.

But your clients (or google) will use URL with hostname, not IP so they will not be able to visit your site. Am I right?

Regards
Alex

[wacl_itstaff]

Apparently they have setup their system so that any of their external IP's will forward the http/https query to the web server(s). They setup our host name, in DNS, to answer with any of these IP's (Round-robin). As per design, when you try to browse the machine will do a lookup for that hostname which will return all available IP's. As long as the page responds on one of them the page will load. Of course if they first try to connect to the URL via one of the unavailable IP's then it will timeout and try the next IP.

I am wondering how I can duplicate this behavior in AHM because for some reason we get multiple failures in a row when checking http. Are you saying that it isn't caching the IP? If so, do you think the test is failing multiple times in a row due to the randomness of the test (It randomly happened to pull the same bad IP multiple times in a row... ie. enough to generate a Bad status (Which in our case is 5 tests).?

[KS-Soft]

You may setup URL test instead of HTTP test, it should work like Internet Explorer.

Regards
Alex