Automatic Reboots

Applies To: CLOUD VPS DEDICATED

By default our Baisc Monitoring (that is included with each Server as Stadnard and part of our Advanced Monitoring) includes Ping monitoring, this means that our Monitoring Systems will ping the Server every few minutes and ensure it responds. If the server fails to respond to the ping twice in / or around a 10 minute period, then it is assumed that the server is offline and to ensure maximum uptime for your Servers, the Server is Rebooted automatically. In the event that the server continues to fail to respond after the reboot, or that the server could not be rebooted automatically, then a Memset Engineer will be alerted and the server be manually inspected. In either case an email is also sent to the Admin Contact listed on the Account notifying them that an auto-reboot occurred.

More information on Memset Server Monitoring options can be found in this Monitoring section of our documentation here.

Why was my Server Automatically Rebooted?

A very common cause of a Server being Automatically Rebooted is the installation of a firewall (or similar) that disallows ping packets. Our Monitoring System is unable to distinguish whether the failure to respond to the ping is due to a firewall or your server actualy being offline, as such the default action is to automatically reboot the server.

Disabling Automatic Reboots

You can disable Auto Reboots at anytime via your Memset Control Panel by navigating to the Manage page for your server and selecting the "Monitoring Settings" option.

In order to avoid this occurring your should ensure that any and all Firewalling on your Server is set to allow traffic from the Memset Systems, full details of the Memset Monitoring Systems IP Address, Ports and Protocols can be found here.

Another common cause is due to a Networking Mis-Configuraton on the Server, if this is the case, you should use Out of Band Access via MemShellor a DRAC (for Dedicated Servers) to access the Console of your Server and take corrective action.

Determining the Cause

In the event that the server crashed or became unresponsive and was auto-rebooted, our monitoring system does not record any information on the cause of the crash, this is because we only monitor the external symptoms of a crash i.e. the failure to respond to a ping request.

For this reason our Technical Support Team is unable to supply any information regarding the cause of the crash without logging into the server, our Technical Support Team will only be able to do this upon request in the form of a Support Ticket and if the server has our Premium Support Level.

The reason for a crash is usually (but not always) recorded in the system logs of the server. If the server has our Premium Support Level then our Technical Support Team will be happy to review the system logs and see if any useful information can be found.

Linux

For Linux based Server, this information is generally contained in the Kernel Message log which can typically be found at:

/var/log/messages

or

/var/log/kern.log

The log file can then be viewed with a utility such as "less", or "cat" e.g.;

less /var/log/messages

For newer systemd based servers the following command will also show the Kernel log:

journalctl

A common cause that can be established by reviewing the System Logs, is that the server exhausted all it's available system memory and eventually the server became unresponsive because of it. Additional Information on the Out of Memory Process Killer can be found here.

Windows

For Windows based Server we recommend you review the Event Logs (Search for "Event Viewer" in Windows), and from there select "Windows Logs" and then "System", this will show all System Related Log Entries.

Sometimes there can be a wide range of information, showing an so to make reviewing these easier you may want to select the "Filter Current Log" option to filter the logs, to a suitable Time Period and hide any Informational Events.

Why didn't my Server get Rebooted?

Servers have a huge number of possible ways to crash. Some crashes will take offline all of the important services e.g. Website (Apache, Nginx, IIS etc), Email, DB etc, whilst still leaving the server able to respond to ping packets. As long as the server is responding to ping packets and only has Basic Monitoring then it will be considered online and will not be rebooted.

This situation can be avoided by upgrading to our Advanced Monitoring as this tier of monitoring can be configured to check the individual statuses of various other services including HTTP, MySQL, SMTP etc and not just the Ping response of the server, giving you a much wider range of checks, to allow you to respond to variety of different situations.

If you would like to upgrade to Advanced Monitoring please contact your Account Manager or our Sales Team here.