Uptime
Uptime has Cardinal watch a self-hosted Media Server and email your Cardinal account if it stops responding. Music, Photos, and Cinema are covered by the Media Server they run on and are not monitored separately.
What Uptime does
Once Uptime is turned on, the Media Server checks in with Cardinal Cloud on a schedule. Cardinal Cloud watches for those check-ins, and if they stop arriving for long enough, it emails the confirmed email address on your Cardinal account.
Turning Uptime on mints a credential from your Cardinal account and sends the first check-in immediately, so the card has something to report right away.
Who can use it
Uptime is available to every Cardinal account, the Free tier included.
You must be signed in to your Cardinal Account for the switch to be available at all; this is the same prerequisite described in the Remote Access guide. The Cloud Services page locks the switch off for a server whose admin is not signed in to a Cardinal Account.
Turning it on
In the Admin Dashboard, go to Cloud Services and find the Uptime card. Turn the switch on.
The switch acts immediately: the Media Server asks Cardinal Cloud for this server's Uptime credential, and the switch reflects the change once that lands.
If your account does not have access to Uptime yet, the request is queued rather than turned down. The switch stays on and the card says the server is queued for Uptime, with the Status row reading "Waiting for access to Uptime".
Nothing more is asked of you. Once the access is approved, the server starts checking in automatically the next time the Cloud Services page is open with your Cardinal Account signed in, and the card moves on to reporting check-ins by itself.
Once Uptime is on, a Configure button appears on the card. It opens the Configure Uptime drawer, covered below.
Options
The Configure Uptime drawer has no save button. Each change is written to the server immediately, and a running check-in timer restarts on the spot if the check-in frequency changes.
Check-in frequency
How often the Media Server tells Cardinal Cloud that it is still running. The choices are 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes, or 1 hour.
Default: every 1 minute.
Grace period
How long Cardinal Cloud waits after a missed check-in before emailing you. A longer grace period means fewer emails over brief interruptions. It is set from the same list of durations as the check-in frequency.
Default: 5 minutes.
Recovery email
A toggle. When it is on, Cardinal Cloud sends a second email once the Media Server starts checking in again after having been reported quiet.
Default: on.
The emails you receive
Cardinal Cloud considers a server quiet once it has gone without a check-in for longer than the check-in interval plus the grace period, combined. At that point it sends one email, to the confirmed email address on your Cardinal account: "<server name> has stopped checking in."
last check-in
│
│ check-in interval
▼
(check-in missed)
│
│ grace period
▼
"<server name> has stopped checking in" email
│
│ check-ins resume
▼
"<server name> is checking in again" email (only if Recovery email is on)
Fig. 1 — from a missed check-in to the emails Cardinal Cloud sends
If check-ins resume after that and Recovery email is on, Cardinal Cloud sends one more email: "<server name> is checking in again."
Both emails name the server and say when it was last heard from; the recovery email also says how long it was quiet. Each server on your account is monitored on its own, so ten servers going quiet means ten separate emails.
Every email explains why you received it, and says that the way to stop them is to turn Uptime off on that server's Cloud Services page.
What the card shows
The Uptime card reports two things, both from the Media Server's own point of view:
| Row | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Status | Disabled, Checking in, Waiting for access to Uptime, Waiting for the first check-in, or Unable to reach Cardinal Cloud since a given date and time |
| Last check-in | The date of the last check-in Cardinal Cloud acknowledged, or Never |
This is what the server has managed to send and hear back, not Cardinal Cloud's own read on whether the server is down — the card can show "Checking in" right up until the moment Cardinal Cloud decides enough time has passed to email you. Current status and last check-in are what the card shows today.
A Check in now button next to Configure sends a check-in immediately and updates both rows with the result, which is useful right after a network change rather than waiting for the next scheduled check-in.
Turning it off
Turn the switch off on the Uptime card. It takes effect immediately: this Media Server stops checking in, Cardinal stops watching it, and you will not be emailed if it goes down. A server that was still queued for access has its request withdrawn as well.
Turning Uptime off pauses monitoring before the credential is revoked, so Cardinal Cloud does not read the stopped check-ins as an outage and email you about it. Uptime turns off on this server regardless of whether Cardinal Cloud could be reached; if it could not, a warning explains that Cardinal may not know yet.
To stop the emails about a particular server, turn Uptime off on that server's own Cloud Services page — this is also what every email itself tells you to do.
Related guides
- Cardinal Account — the account Uptime emails
- Remote Access — the cloud login prerequisite, explained in context
- Secure Backups — another cloud service tied to your Cardinal Account
- Popularity Data Pool — another cloud service tied to your Cardinal Account
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