External health checks

For clients that will be hosting their own Optimizely Configured Commerce instance, we suggest that they review some of our best practices and guidance relative to managing the site. While we may call out certain things, such as server and database health, we are not making specific recommendations in these areas. Rather, we are focusing on those areas that are most meaningful to managing a Configured Commerce site.

Health checks can be performed two ways:

SimplePing – Using [SiteUrl]/simpleping.aspx, a typical set up would be loading this page once a minute and triggering a site down alert if the page is not loaded successfully 5 consecutive times. If possible, the health check should be configured to look for the text "SimplePing is good".

SimplePing performs the following:


Basic IIS check	.aspx pages run through the .net pipeline
Session check	retrieves and sets a value in the session
Database check	retrieves a value from the database
Lucene check	looks up a simple product in the lucene index
WIS check	validates that all WIS servers have connected within the last 10 minutes

QuickPing – Using [SiteUrl]/quickping.aspx, you can get reports on statuses for each Health Check. If any health check fails, QuickPing fail. If QuickPing succeeds, it returns a "QuickPing is good".

QuickPing performs the following:


Eagar caching	checks for settings and translations
Elasticsearch check	makes sure search index is available
Database check	makes sure database is available

A service such as Pingdom can be used for performing this health check and alerting someone when there is a problem.

Troubleshooting failed health checks

Try to load [SiteUrl]/simpleping.aspx in your browser
1. If nothing loads or you get a failed to connect message from your browser, this may be a DNS issue.
  1. Hit the simpleping.aspx page directly on the server, if it loads successfully there that indicates it is most likely a DNS or load balancer issue.
  2. If it fails to connect, there may be a network or IIS issue.
  3. If it connects but you receive an error page it is an application level issue.
  4. If you see a message "Last successful WIS heartbeat job was run at [DateTime]. WIS may be down" then the issue is with WIS
2. If you get a response from the server, but it is a 4xx or 5xx response, it is probably an application level issue.