Both of these are diagnostics that will help you investigate and debug the issues that were causing your monitored target to be offline, but there’s a big difference in how our system collects the data for these two logs.
In short, the Location Fail Log is collecting data the exact moment a monitoring location finds any errors with your monitored target, while the Network Diagnostics are dispatched to be collected once our central system determines that your monitored target is offline.
Now, to expand a little bit on this, we’ll take a few case scenarios:
Case A – Target A is monitored from 3 different locations: Location A, Location B, Location C.
- Location A has issues loading Target A (i.e.: connection timed out):
– it logs the connection time out error into the Location Fail Log
– informs the central system that it has issues with Target A - Location B & Location C have the same issues and follow the exact same procedure as above.
- Central System now deems Target A as being offline, and dispatches Location A, B, and C to collect the Network Diagnostics logs.
In the above scenario, which is your average downtime detection, both the Location Fail Log and the Network Diagnostics are collected, but they are quite a few seconds apart, which is the time that has passed from each location noticing Target A as being offline, to when the Central System changed the status of the uptime monitor as being offline and asked the locations to collect the Network Diagnostics.
But let’s look at a less than usual case, where just one location has issues (i.e.: could be due to the target having regional network issues).
Case B –Â Target A is monitored from 3 different locations: Location A, Location B, Location C.
- Location A has issues loading Target A (i.e.: connection timed out):
– it logs the connection time out error into the Location Fail Log
– informs the central system that it has issues with Target A - But this time Location B & Location C don’t have any issues, so they report back OK signals to the Central System.
- Central System, given the fact that just one out of 3 location has issues, deems the uptime monitor as still being online, and no Network Diagnostics are being collected (because there is no actual downtime in progress).
In this scenario, the Location Fail Log has collected data that Location A had issues, but there is no downtime and no Network Diagnostics exist for this incident.
Bottom line being that your Location Fail Log will contain more entries than Network Diagnostics, because it logs every individual failed attempt, even if no downtime was detected.