Frequently Asked Questions
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What does the suricat.eu site offer?
The suricat.org site is a community of users who want to monitor their Internet services. This monitoring can be free or paid. To use the site for free, simply install a Suricat agent to monitor member sites from your own computer.
You can also choose not to install an agent on your computer. To use the Suricat network, you will need to purchase monitoring tokens, which will be consumed when monitoring your website.
The Suricat network will notify you of any malfunction on your site (excessive response time, HTTP error response, or response different from the expected one) by sending an email, text message, or RSS feed.
What steps do I need to take to monitor my website?
To monitor your website, you need to:
- Create an account on the site.
- If you wish, you can download a suricate. The suricat is a small computer program that monitors the websites of members of the suricat network. Make sure that the suricat is launched each time you start up your computer. This will allow you to earn more monitoring tokens (a suricat that is not working, that is not monitoring, does not generate tokens).
- Create your monitoring tasks.
- Create alerts to be triggered in the event of a malfunction. This step allows you to receive an email or text message in the event of a malfunction.
- Purchase monitoring tokens (if you have chosen not to use a suricat, or if it is not working properly). Or purchase text messages to receive alerts on your mobile phone.
How can I get help?
There are several ways to get help:
- Consult the FAQ
- Send a message to support@suricat.fr
- Call (33)-(0)1-85-09-38-97. If there is no answer, please use an alternative means of contact.
If you leave a message by email, please wait at least 24 business hours before sending another email message.
What does the Suricat site offer?
The suricat.eu site is a website monitoring tool (monitoring the availability of your servers, monitoring their response and compliance). This monitoring is carried out via a technical platform (on our own servers) and via the computers of the site's participants. A Suricat is installed on each of these computers. It communicates securely with our web platform, which collects the monitoring results.
When a malfunction is detected by our platform, an alert can be sent by email, SMS, or RSS feed.
How do I download a suricat?
To download a Suricat, you must be logged in to the site. This allows us to assign an identity to the Suricat you download: the monitoring points (tokens) earned by your Suricat will be credited to you. After logging in via the “Your Account” tab, click on the ‘Home’ tab, then on the “Download” link. We will then ask you to choose an operating system (the one on the machine on which you want to install the Suricat), the name of the proxy server and the port number used to browse the Internet (this information is provided by your Internet service provider—in most cases, these settings can be left blank), and the frequency at which you want to perform monitoring from your workstation (this setting allows you to monopolize or free up bandwidth for Suricat. The higher the frequency—close to one minute—the more requests Suricat will make on the web. The lower the frequency—close to 30 minutes—the fewer requests Suricat will make and the less bandwidth it will use) before starting the download. You will obtain a zip file that you can extract on your computer. This zip file contains two or three files:
- The Suricat agent (suricat on Linux and suricat.exe on Windows)
- A configuration file called suricat.ini (which contains the information you have just been asked to provide)
- A program called wget.exe (Windows only). This program is a GNU utility that allows you to connect to the monitored URLs.
You can now install Suricat wherever you want and launch it by double-clicking on the Suricat agent. We recommend that you launch the Suricat agent every time you start your computer. To launch it at every startup, in Windows, click here. In Linux, Suricat is launched automatically as indicated here.
Which operating systems are compatible with Suricat?
Suricat agents are compatible with most versions of Windows, as well as most versions of Linux. We have tested it on Windows XP and Windows Vista (32-bit), as well as on Debian and Ubuntu.
Please let us know if you are able to use any of the versions of Suricat on your preferred operating system. We will include this information here.
How to install Suricat on Windows?
To install Suricat on Windows, you need to download Suricat after providing some information.
The downloaded zip file contains three files:
- The suricat.exe file. This is what will enable your websites to be monitored.
- The suricat.ini file, which contains the specific settings for your computer. We do not recommend using the same Suricat for two different computers: only the tokens from the first computer will be counted.
- The install.bat file. This file will install your suricat and enable it to start when your computer starts up.
To install your suricat, unzip the zip file to a location of your choice. Then double-click on the install.bat file. This will install your suricat.
How to install Suricat on Linux?
To install Suricat on Linux, you need to download Suricat after providing some information.
The downloaded zip file contains two files:
- The suricat file. This is what will enable monitoring of your websites.
- The suricat.ini file, which contains the specific settings for your computer. We do not recommend using the same suricat for two different computers: only the tokens from the first computer will be counted.
To launch your suricat, type the following command line:
./suricatThe suricat will launch. To start it automatically, we suggest using a batch file that will launch it.
How do I launch Suricat when Windows starts up?
To install Suricat on Windows, you need to download Suricat after providing some information.
The downloaded zip file contains 3 files:
- the suricat.exe file. This is what will enable monitoring of your websites.
- the suricat.ini file, which contains the specific settings for your computer. We do not recommend using the same Suricat for two different computers: only the tokens from the first computer will be counted.
- An install.bat file. This file will install your suricat and enable it to start when your computer boots up.
To install your suricat, unzip the zip file to a location of your choice. Then double-click on the install.bat file. This will install your suricat.
How do I launch Suricat when Linux starts up?
To install Suricat on Linux, you need to download Suricat after providing some information.
The downloaded zip file contains two files:
- The suricat file. This is what will enable monitoring of your websites.
- The suricat.ini file, which contains the specific settings for your computer. We do not recommend using the same suricat for two different computers: only the tokens from the first computer will be counted.
To launch your suricat, type the following command line:
./suricatThe suricat will launch. To start it automatically, we suggest using a batch file that will launch it.
What can be monitored?
You can monitor any service accessible on the Internet that uses the http, ftp, and https protocols using Suricat agents.
Can I monitor my competitors' websites?
No, because we are certain that you would not accept one of your competitors monitoring your website and finding out about a potential malfunction before you do. Each site monitored by Suricats agents must display a property seal in the form of an HTML tag:
<meta name="suricat_sign" content="50a67631fe5780a5d7f21c530fde35be"/>
This seal can only be placed on the page by the webmaster of the page. This means that only the site owner can place this ownership seal.
Where should the ownership seal be placed?
The ownership seal should be placed between the <head> and </head> tags of your HTML page.
This seal takes the form of an HTML tag:
<meta name="suricat_sign" content="ac01e77fffcd85cd1798ee5f8e69c2bf"/>
N.B.: the content variable changes for each of the monitored URLs
If you have trouble placing this seal on your web page, you can send us an email at tech@suricat.eu
What is the ownership seal?
The ownership seal is a tag that is invisible to the end user. We check for the presence of this tag in your HTML page before activating monitoring of it.
What are START, END, NEW, and CHANGED statuses?
The START, END, NEW, and CHANGED statuses are the statuses reported by the suricats when they
- detect a malfunction (START status). This malfunction may be different from the one you specified.
- detect a service restoration (END status). The malfunction seen previously has ended.
- detect a change in the malfunction of your site (CHANGED status). A malfunction was initially detected. But its nature has changed. The CHANGED status corresponds to this scenario.
- start monitoring (NEW). Not all suricats monitor all sites. If a suricat starts up or begins monitoring a site that it has never monitored since it started up, it sends the NEW status.
What unit is used to report page size?
The unit of measurement for page size is the byte. This corresponds to the size of the page retrieved by the suricat at the time of monitoring.
What is HTTP status?
HTTP status is a status returned by servers in response to a request. There are normal statuses (below 400) and error statuses. You can find the meaning of these statuses on the Wikipedia page on HTTP statuses
What is the difference between status and HTTP status?
HTTP status is the status returned by servers in response to an HTTP request. The START, END, NEW, and CHANGED statuses correspond to the monitoring status.
What is the confidence rate?
The confidence rate is the level of confidence we assign to monitoring data. An agent may not have been able to connect to a site, but that does not necessarily mean that the site is inaccessible. We therefore assign a score (the confidence rate) to every alert reported by a Suricata agent.
What is a lack of monitoring?
A lack of monitoring means that no suricate was available to monitor your site. Even though several suricates should be monitoring your site continuously, certain circumstances can lead to this situation (suricate users' computers are turned off at almost the same time, monitoring platform is inaccessible).
How is it that the Suricate network detects response times that are slower than those seen by my users?
When your users browse the web, the browsers they use retrieve the page and display it. However, this display can take time: the browser has to calculate the layout of the elements on the page. This display is usually the cause of the additional time seen by your users. Another cause may be the use of browser-side scripts, which can slow down the display of a page, sometimes significantly.
How long are reports retained?
Reports are kept for 12 rolling months. After that, they are no longer available.
What is the average response time?
The average response time is the average response time for the month in question. It is calculated by taking all the measurements presented. Reports are kept for 12 rolling months. Beyond that, they are no longer available.
What is the average response time?
The average response time is the average response time for the month in question. It is calculated by taking all the measurements presented reports are kept for 12 rolling months. Beyond that, they are no longer available.
What is the response time for OK measurements?
This response time corresponds to the time required to return a response that complies with what is expected.
What is the response time for NOK measurements?
This response time corresponds to the time required to return a non-compliant response. This average response time is measured for all non-compliant responses.
What is the percentage of responses in less than n seconds?
You have set a maximum response time (usually less than 30 seconds). The suricats have determined which responses were returned beyond this maximum time. The site then calculates the percentage of responses with non-compliant times.
What is the error duration (HTTP status >400)?
When a site returns a response, it also returns a code. When the code is greater than 400, a connection error or server error has occurred. The error duration is recorded.
For more information, click on the list of HTTP codes
What is the percentage of time without HTML errors?
When a site returns a response, it also returns a code. When the code is greater than 400, a connection error or server error has occurred. The duration without errors is counted.
What is the non-compliance duration (phrase not found)?
If you define a
What is the percentage of time a compliant response is delivered?
This is the percentage of time during which the server was able to return a compliant response.
Why are my reports changed when I modify my monitoring? Can I avoid this?
When you redefine your monitoring, the alerts reported by the suricates are no longer valid. The calculations performed on the report page are then no longer valid. When you request the reports to be recalculated, they will be incorrect. To avoid this, save your reports in PDF format as they become available. This will ensure that your reports are always up to date.
What is a phantom monitoring alert? How can they be avoided?
A phantom monitoring is a monitoring that does not succeed because the request was lost on the Internet. If you want to avoid them, you can exclude them.
Please note that these phantom monitorings are very rare these days. It is often unnecessary to exclude them.
Why are not all monitoring errors real?
When a Suricat performs monitoring, it may highlight a non-real monitoring error in the following cases:
- the Suricate software is unable to contact the server because your computer is overloaded, or
- the network path used to reach the server is not working,
- your network connection is down,
In these cases, your suricate will send an error to the network, even though the server is working correctly. The suricate network calculates the probability that your suricate is wrong, based on the results of other suricates monitoring the server.
Why are response times never longer than 10 minutes and 5 seconds?
In order to avoid being blocked by a poor connection, suricate software has a maximum TTL (Time to Leave) of 10 minutes. This is why maximum response times cannot exceed 10 minutes.
Why do we sometimes have HTTP statuses equal to zero?
When the suricate cannot contact the server and no network equipment returns an HTTP status, then the only HTTP status known to the suricate is status 0, corresponding to no actual response obtained.
Why does the compliance graph only take values of 0 or 100?
A response can only be identical to the expected response (compliant response) or non-compliant. If the response is compliant, compliance is 100%. If the response is non-compliant, compliance is 0%. Therefore, the graph only includes compliant (100%) or non-compliant (0%) responses.
Are your prices inclusive or exclusive of tax?
Our prices are VAT-exempt in accordance with Article 293B of the French General Tax Code (CGI).
As a result, companies cannot recover VAT on the services offered. Individuals, associations, and small companies pay the same price as businesses.
Why do you use Stripe as a payment intermediary?
Suricat has chosen Stripe as its trusted payment intermediary because Stripe allows payment by a large number of payment methods worldwide. Stripe is recognized as a reliable intermediary by the largest market regulatory authorities (GIE CB, Visa, Mastercard, etc.).
For Publications Online, using Stripe is a guarantee of trust and ensures us some of the lowest processing fees on the market.
I just purchased some products. How long will it take for them to appear on the interface?
As soon as your purchase is validated by Stripe, Stripe sends us the information we need to validate your purchases on the platform.
There may be a delay of a few minutes before the message is sent to our platform. If it takes more than a few hours, please contact us at the following email address: support@suricat.fr.