We have seen a large number of alert emails go out from our Monitoring System and they appear to be caused by problems with Network Solutions DNS  servers being intermittently unavailable. No word yet as to when it might be resolved.

Network Solutions Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/networksolutions
Network Solutions Twitter – https://twitter.com/netsolcares

You can check your DNS with our tool – http://mxtoolbox.com/DNSLookup.aspx. Network solutions servers names end with .worldnic.com.

We recently released an often requested feature – API access to MxToolbox.  With the API, you can easily integrate MxToolBox directly in your own tools and website.

What is it?

The API is a RESTful Web Service.  Basically, you send a url to the site, and it will return the results in JSON format.  RESTFul services allow for simple testing.  For example, if you want to do a dns lookup on example.com, you go to

http://api.mxtoolbox.com/api/v1/lookup/dns/example.com/

with the following results:

    {
    "UID": "bca9f444-f28d-4d49-9368-2386d70e3034",
    "Command": "dns",
    "CommandArgument": "example.com",
    "TimeRecorded": "2013-10-11T10:40:21.7445287-05:00",
    "ReportingNameServer": "a.iana-servers.net",
    "TimeToComplete": "5101",
    "HasSubscriptions": false,
...
    ],
    "Passed": [
        {
            "ID": 305,
            "Name": "DNS Bad Glue Detected",
            "Info": "No Bad Glue Detected"
        },
    ]
...
}

You may notice that this information is almost exactly what you would get if you ran this in SuperTool:

http://mxtoolbox.com/supertool.aspx?action=dns:example.com

With the API, there is no longer a need to “scrape” the SuperTool results.

In all, the REST API has three functions/urls available

The above links show example uses of each function.  In order to regulate usage, you are required to Request an API Key.  Each of the example links above include a “API Access Key” section with a button to request a key.  The api key is associated with your account.  Like all good things, we require a paid subscription to access the full power of the API.  The limits are defined in the  API Documentation.

To help with testing, we also allow all “example.com” lookups to be completed without an api key. This is why the above example works.  If, for example, you try navigating to http://api.mxtoolbox.com/api/v1/lookup/dns/mxtoolbox.com/ , you will get an “Invalid ApiKey” error because the argument is “mxtoolbox.com,” not “example.com.”  Please see the api documentation and examples for the proper way to use your ApiKey.

Use Cases

Customers have asked for this functionality for multiple reasons.  Usually it is to run a blacklist on demand from their own toolset.  The second most popular request is to get a “real time” version of their monitors.  We are excited to see what other uses customers have for the API.

The API is currently in BETA, so expect some slight changes as we determine the needs of our customer.  As always, we appreciate any feedback.

We are trying to add a new monitor or feature every month at mxtoolbox.com and for August we have added SSL certificate analysis onto our HTTPS tool and monitor.

The new version of the HTTPS tool will still go and fetch a page at whatever https:// url you configure. This will make sure that the web server is online and serving pages. Just as with our HTTP monitor, you can include an optional word (or regular expression) that must be present on the page in order to pass, so you can configure the test to confirm an additional bit of status as well.

In addition, we have added SSL Certificate Analysis. We will inspect each link of the security chain for information and errors. In addition to errors, we will also issue a warning if any certificate in the chain is due to expire in less than one month. So you can use the lookup tool to quickly check your cert, and by adding a monitor, you will receive an alert when you are due to begin the process of obtaining a new certificate with plenty of time to obtain and install the new cert.

You will receive an alert if

• DNS Check – If we can’t resolve your domain
• Connectivity Check – If we can’t connect on port 443
• Keyword Check- If your keyword is missing
• Performance Check – If your page doesn’t return within 15 seconds
• Certificate Validity Check – If your certificate is invalid
• Expiration Check – If your certificate is expired
• Expiration Reminder – If your certificate expires within a month

We have just introduced a new monitoring feature called “Notification Delay,” which allows you to adjust how long a Monitor must be down before generating a problem alert.

Most of our monitors are high priority–we are notified immediately if there is a problem. However, we have a few that are less important like batch jobs and non-critical systems. Notification is only necessary if they have been down for a longer period of time (maybe 30 minutes or an hour). Another example is automatic maintenance jobs over the weekend that briefly shut down some services and notification is only necessary if something has been down longer than expected.

You can set the delay on the monitor details screen which you can get to from the Monitor Tree, your Dashboard, or your main Monitors list. For your convenience we have put a link directly to the details in all alert emails.

The default value is to Send Immediately. You can choose values of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1, 2 or 4 hours of sensitivity.

Please note, notification delay is only applicable to MxToolBox “transactional” monitors such as Mailflow, SMTP, TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS. There is not a notification delay setting on Blacklist monitors. To adjust blacklist notification frequencies, contact support to activate the Summary Alert Message (SAM) feature that generates alert reports containing all of your monitors that are in transition in one nicely formatted email message.

Notification Delay is available now to all of our paid users. If you’ve thought about upgrading your free account, now is the time!

Thousand of companies from around the world use MxToolBox’s blacklist lookup and monitoring tools to keep their online reputation safe.  This service checks your IP Address against multiple blacklists to tell you if your server is blacklisted.  Today we are adding domain-based blacklist lookups to the tools.

These domain blacklists (RHBLs, or Right-handed black lists) are an increasingly popular way to attempt to cut down on spam and fraud.  They work like this.  Instead of a server’s IP being listed, an entire domain name could be listed.  For example, if your domain name is example.com, companies may look at the From: field and the body of an email message to see if they contain links to that domain name.

Keep in mind that MxToolBox does not run or endorse any of these lists, and users of our paid monitoring service can opt to “Ignore” these lists from their tool results and monitoring alerts.

All you need to do is run a blacklist check like normal on the website, but instead of entering an IP address, you just enter a domain name (example.com).  MxToolBox will detect that you have entered a domain name and run BOTH the “normal” IP based lists and the domain-based ones as well.

We have added a few new lists this week and expect to add more over the coming weeks.  Anyone can run a domain-based lookup on our web site for free, and users of our paid service can subscribe to alerts on these.

Your next blacklist summary email should reflect these new blacklists for any domain based monitors you have.

Main image courtesy of ivanpw