Overview

When using KoalaPing or another ping tool like pingdom the first URL you want to test is your homepage. You enter for example www.koalamon.com and let the tools do the rest. But that is not always the best idea.

In many cases, a frequently used website uses a caching mechanism because you don’t want to create your homepage over and over again. But when you are pinging the URL directly you only test the cache in that case. You will only find an error when the cache times out and that can be five minutes later or even hours if the caching layer is configured this way. To bypass that problem there is a simple solution. Just enter a timestamp after the URL as a url parameter. The caching layer will think that this is a new URL and won’t answer with a caching response but will ask the backend to return the result.

When using Leankoala and KoalaPing it is very easy to bypass the cache because our tool will add the timestamp automatically if wanted. This can be done via the "add timestamp" checkbox. Afterward, we will enter a URL parameter that will get us directly to the backend.

With the redirects-option, it is possible to “follow redirects” or to "do not follow redirects".

"Follow redirects" make sense if it is only important to check the status code after the redirection. KoalaPing does this without sending the 301 status code from the page where the redirection is set up.

If the option "do not follow redirects" is selected, the redirection will not be followed by KoalaPing. It only checks the status code of the page on which the redirection is set up. If this works without errors, the result will be a 301 status code.

Normally the HTTP Status Code starts with 100 (Continue) and ends with 511 (Network Authorization Required). There is no status code 000. And that’s good. Though in our case we wanted to have that element in our list. Just for usability reasons. When configuring KoalaPing you are able to select which HTTP status code your system has to answer. This can be 200 if the service should answer normally or 403 if you want to test if the access is forbidden for an anonymous user. Unfortunately, it is not possible to handle a request that does not get any answer using HTTP codes. That totally makes sense, because the server did not response with a valid HTTP response.

For better usability in Leankoala, we decided to introduce that 0 (Connection Error) status code. Using that you expect that KoalaPing will not get any answer from the server. This, for example, can be quite convenient if you want to make sure that your system can’t be reached from outside of your DMZ.