About link checkers and other monitoring

You may want to set up checks to make sure that everything is working. Subject to some constraints that’s ok.

Ping checks

A ping a few times per hour should be enough as we have our own monitoring in place.

Load testing

You may not run load testing against any part of our infrastructure.

Link checkers

These are great for spotting broken links but can cause problems. When a link checker visits lots of links on the same internet domain, at speed, it can look like a cyber attack.

If you’re using the OpenAthens Redirector, you may have hundreds or even thousands of links that all start with https://go.openathens.net/...

In such cases, you should configure your main checker run to skip those links and do a separate check on them limiting the number of threads to less than 100 checks per minute to avoid any automated protections. This regular expression could be used to identify any OpenAthens link for exclusion or inclusion:

http[s:\/\/]*\w*\.openathens\.net.*