Agents are servers that perform monitoring tasks from locations around the world. Monitoring Agents can be added or removed from individual devices as necessary.
Monitoring Agents: Locations
Setup and configuration of Agents is an important part of setting up a Device. The choice of which Agents are used is based on the specific monitoring goals (for example, an exclusively North America-based company would likely only monitor device using North America-based Agents). The list of activated Agents monitoring a device can be changed at any time by going to Edit and selecting, or deselecting the monitoring Agent locations.
The number of Agents involved in monitoring a device defines the degree of monitoring accuracy.
Having a single monitoring Agent location can result in a false alert. This is often due to an isolated issue occurring on the Internet itself (examples, a network hop issue, or a network provider (such as, AT&T) issue), which impacts the ability of a single Agent location to actually conduct successful monitoring via the Internet to the Device.
It is recommended that you monitor from at least five monitoring Agent locations. This provides a more complete snapshot of the network, server, web page, and web application conditions if performance issues are detected. It also helps prevent false alerts due to network issues.
Private Agents
All monitoring Agent locations are listed in the Monitoring Agents (Locations) section (go to Device >Edit > Monitoring) and are grouped by continental geography: North America, South America, Europe, and the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Africa.
If Private Agents are installed they will be listed as custom-named Agent locations within the section.
Standard monitoring agent locations are, by default, available within the device interface.
Premium monitoring agent locations are not, by default, available within the device interface.
Contact Dotcom-Monitor support at 1-888-479-0741 x1, or sales@dotcom-monitor.com for questions, or to enable the Premium Agent locations.
The additional cost for the Premium Agent locations is due to significant bandwidth costs in those geographies.
Dotcom-Monitor operates remote Agents on six continents. These Agents are located in Tier-3 data centers close to the world’s major Internet backbones. The close proximity to major Internet backbones helps ensure network latency associated with the Agents is non-consequential. The Agents are maintained on high-capacity servers to ensure monitoring is extremely accurate and consistent.
Here is a current list of Monitoring Agent Locations.
The Beijing (China) monitoring agent, is located behind the Great Firewall of China, which is administered directly by the Chinese government. The Chinese government has a filtering rule in place for all Internet traffic and it is not public. These filtering rules are modified frequently, which, in turn, affects monitoring results from the Beijing, China Agent.