NewRelic Always Says My App Is Down

Question

I have the NewRelic addon installed on my Heroku application and I'm attempting to use their "Availability" feature but it aways says that my app is down. Also, if I try to change the URL that I want to ping I will always get:

New Relic saved your changes, but http://skateparks.co/uptime timed out after 10 seconds. Ensure that the URL was entered properly, or edit the URL below

If I do a "curl http://skateparks.co/uptime" Then I'll get a response that the application is fine.

Answer 1

I work at New Relic and I've created a ticket for you on our support site where we can troubleshoot this further. You should get an email soon with a link to that ticket, but feel free to ping me directly if you have any other questions.

cheers, b

Answer 2

The error message you get when you edit the URL is informative only. We do a sanity check by pinging the URL synchronously when you modify it to help you ensure that you entered it correctly. Sometimes we are unable to ping a site at the time the URL is entered, and even though we display the warning message, we still keep your settings and start pinging the URL. We had at least one customer report that they always got the error when editing their URL even though the pinger itself once it got the updated settings never indicated there was any problem with the URL.

If you get a downtime alert with your URL but you believe the error is incorrect, a good starting point for troubleshooting is to curl your target using the following command, which mimics exactly what our Pinger does.

curl -H --head "Accept: text/html" -H "Cache-Control: no-cache, max-age=0" -H "User-Agent: NewRelicPinger/1.0" -H "X-Newrelic-Ignore: true" http://www.newrelic.com

Note that we start with a head request, and if your server doesn't support it fall back to a get request. To mimic the get request just use the curl command above but remove --head.