About link checkers and other monitoring

It’s perfectly understandable that you may want to set up checks to confirm that all of the links in your portal or library page are valid. That kind of check is great, but it can cause problems when it checks lots of links very quickly that go to the same internet domain because that 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.*

If you want to check that we’re ‘up’ we won’t be insulted, but a ping or similar per hour is probably enough. Do bear in mind though that we have customers all around the world, so anything that happens whilst you’re asleep is very likely to be noticed, reported and perhaps even fixed before you start work again.

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