KnightGuard.Net User's Guide
Testing

After you input your site to be monitored, monitoring begins immediately (unless you "disabled" it at the time you set it up). While you can take our word for it that you will be notified in the case of trouble, you may also want to test - just to be sure.

There are two basic ways to test that you will receive an alert in the case of trouble.

If you have access to the server
If you have administrative access to the server or a firewall in front of the server, you can deny KnightGuard.Net access by IP address. Use PING to determine KnightGuard.Net's IP address and configure your software to deny GET requests (browsing) from that address. When KnightGuard.Net is unable to get a page (tries once every 15 minutes), it will triger an alert.

Alternately, you could schedule a server downtime, but that's a bit extreme.

If you don't have access to the server
As is the case with shared hosting environments, you may may not have administrative access to the server. In this case, it will be necessary to "fake" a failure. Go into your KnightGuard.Net account and change your URL slightly so that it points to an invalid server (not an invalid page, as this will not trigger an alert). For instance, if we were monitoring ourselves, we might test by enterring "http://www.knightguard.moc/" (the .MOC on the end is obviously an unknown address). You should receive an alert next time KnightGuard tries to visit the URL.

Title Change Test

You can also perform a Title change test. KnightGuard keeps track of the Title of the page monitored, and remembers it each time the page is retrieved. If the title changes, (as when a "Error 404, Page Not Found" page is displayed instead of your own page) you'll get an alert. Before you do a title change test, you need to let KnightGuard "learn" your page title by waiting for a monitoring cycle to occur. The first time your URL is monitored, the page title is remembered. To perform the test: