Spam Experts monitors the software on your Local Cloud servers and handles software updates on the platform. Issues related to hardware, resources and networking are the responsibility of the Local Cloud owner, as that is beyond our control. Using our Hosted Cloud product, we do fully monitor and operate the hardware, resources and networking for you.
Spam Experts does not change or adjust the settings of the Local Cloud environment. As administrator you are granted full access to control the software via the Dashboard and available APIs.
Update and maintenance period
Spam Experts releases a new software build every Tuesday around 12:30 CET. As Super Administrator, you can schedule the weekly update day/time of your Local Cloud on the "Server" > "Settings" page.
We keep interruptions during the update process at minimum, and they will never result in loss of email, at worst email delivery is slightly delayed. The systems will only update 1 at a time to minimize the impact.
Unexpected problems
Whenever a software problem is detected, our engineers are automatically notified and will investigate the problem. Usually software issues are resolved during the next update and maintenance period. If a software issue is detected that requires immediate intervention, the problem will be directly resolved. If problems have occurred to live services (such as the API, webinterface, or quarantine) affecting our clients, we will keep you informed on our Uptime page at https://uptime.n-able.com/
If you detect any issues with your servers, please always contact us at support@spamexperts.com before taking any actions. Also ensure to always send an email before you phone, so our engineers can handle your case optimally.
System load
It is important to have sufficient (virtual) hardware resources available at all times, as we have no control over the availability of your resources.
Disk I/O throughput, available disk space, memory, and CPU resources all affect the system load. Whenever the load would become too high on average, please ensure to increase the available resources (either on the existing servers or by adding more servers to the Local Cloud setup). If you like to receive further details on existing resource bottlenecks on your platform, please contact support@spamexperts.com in order to analyze your system.
Network/hardware problems
Customers are responsible for keeping their hardware and networks operational, as we do not manage the underlying environment and hence such issues cannot be covered by our support. If any problems occur, our monitoring will switch to “maintenance mode” until the underlying environment issues are resolved and we can continue to monitor the software.
Please inform us 3 working days in advance prior to any scheduled maintenance on the environment.
Diskspace availability
If a server runs low on diskspace, our engineers will analyze the current disk usage and purge any data to free up immediate space (this may include quarantined spam/viruses when required, archived data will not be removed). They will reach out to request additional diskspace to be added to prevent such situation from reoccurring in the future.
SNMP
Although you are officially not allowed to make any changes to the software on the machine, we do allow customers to run the SNMP daemon to monitor their hardware resources. This will not affect the Spam Experts monitoring. You can request our support to install the daemon.
Alternatively we advise customers to monitor their server resources by querying the Software API and retrieve the status of all resources/systems.
Please note that our support does not support securing and configuring SNMP and this must be handled by the clients directly
Using Nagios
It's possible to monitor your Spam Experts systems directly via a Nagios monitoring system. Read more about the open-source sample script available here.
Monitoring your servers via the Software API
For monitoring purposes you can use our Software API. There are 2 API calls available depending on what kind of format suits your requirements:
https://API_USER:API_PASS@PRIMARY_HOSTNAME/cgi-bin/api?call=api_get_server_status
https://API_USER:API_PASS@PRIMARY_HOSTNAME/cgi-bin/api?call=api_get_json_server_status
Example usage:
- Add a new Software API monitoring user from Control Panel menu > Server > Software API users
- On your monitoring server create a cron script to call our API and feed the data to the monitoring software
curl -k "https://API_USER:API_PASSWORD@PRIMARY_HOSTNAME/cgi-bin/api?call=api_get_server_status"
Example on how to call the API in Bash:
You can find more information and description of these calls, including what data they return, in the API help documentation at:
https://API_USER:API_PASSWORD@PRIMARY_HOSTNAME/cgi-bin/api?call=api_help
An example script for monitoring “load avg1” across all the cluster's servers. The data can be sent to your monitoring server.
#!/bin/bash
curl -k https://API_USER:API_PASSWORD@PRIMARY_HOSTNAME/cgi-bin/api?call=api_get_server_status | while read line; do data=( `echo $line | sed 's/,/ /g'` ); echo HOSTNAME: ${data[0]} LOAD AVG1: ${data[1]}; done
24x7 premium support contract
Clients with a 24x7 premium support contract receive extended monitoring. Please contact us for more details.