Hello!
Today Pan X gave me the following error messages.
And:
This is the second time this error has occurred. The error went away when I restarted the server. Also, my account balance is (and was) adequate.
I’m not sure if this is a local issue, or a Pan X issue. Regardless of the source, the goal of this post is simply to bring this to the attention of admin.
All the best,
Paul
I don’t know why this happened, based on your description it should not have happened.
If it does happen again, here is something you can try. If you look down further in the Server preferences panel, you’ll see a battery icon. It should be green, but I imagine it had turned red and showed a low battery level. In any case you can click on this for an a pop-up menu.
If you choose Check Account Balance it will force your server to check with the ProVUE server for your account balance. This was intended for updating the server after you’ve made a payment, but if rebooting the server made it work I think this would also.
OK. I will try this next time. Thank you.
For the second time in a matter of weeks, a web server has been offline for some hours due to this situation.
The red battery was showing but after a reboot of Panorama it correctly showed a balance of 147 hours. While it was offline, all site vistors were greeted by the low balance warning.
Not a good scenario.
I don’t know of any reason for this to happen (or maybe I do, see the end of this post). However, even if it does happen, the web server software has a 3-day grace period built in. Even if it shows the “red battery”, it will continue to work for 3 days, giving you time to resolve the problem.
However, this grace period won’t help you if you aren’t monitoring the web site. I highly recommend using some sort of external monitoring software. Panorama Server includes support to facilitate this.
There are many different monitoring systems out there, ProVUE uses uptimerobot.com but there are at least dozens to choose from. You can configure these systems to send you an email or text message immediately when there is a problem. With this set up you’ll know immediately if there is any kind of problem, and if the problem is related to payment then you have a couple of days to resolve it.
If a payment is made on another computer (not the server computer), it can take awhile before the server registers that a payment has been made. That could be the issue here. The help page shows how to make sure that the server has the most up-to-date payment status. It’s likely that you could have followed the procedure described here rather than rebooting the server.
All good advice, and mostly in place.
Not quite sure how any such service would detect the issue until it actually kicks in at the end of the grace period.
Worth noting though, the balance on the account has been high. It had not been recently updated and this was the second such occurance withing less than two weeks.
Monitoring services like uptimerobot can check for the presence or absence of a text string in the response from a URL. UptimeRobot calls this “keyword monitoring”. The Panorama Server jsonstatusurl is designed for working with keyword monitoring. Just set up the monitor to check for the absence of
Panorama X Server ALL SYSTEMS GO
and you’ll get notified if there is any problem - including when the grace period kicks in. This is all documented in the second link I posted above.
I just checked and UptimeRobot continues to have a free plan that allows monitoring every 5 minutes. So for no cost, you can be notified within 5 minutes whenever there is a problem with your server. There are so many possible server problems that can crop up that I consider this a must for any publicly facing server. Note, I have no connection with UptimeRobot other than using their service for many years (more than a decade, I think). There are also many other services available.
Without a lot more information, I cannot explain the cause of this incident. The balance on this account did get fairly low a few weeks ago, and a payment was made. Before that there appeared to be no problems in the previous 8 months of operation, and there are no other reports of this problem from other installations. Of course I can never categorically say that this couldn’t be caused by a bug, but if so it’s going to be very difficult to track down something that only occurs on such a rare basis. Please set up a monitoring system, and report back if there are further occurrences. But at least with a monitoring system, this should not result in downtime if there is a problem.