Uptime monitor
About PhyniteMonitor
If you’re seeing PhyniteMonitor/1.0 in your server logs or firewall, that’s us. Here’s what it does, why, and how to control it.
What is PhyniteMonitor?
PhyniteMonitor is the uptime monitor behind Phynite Solutions’ Blog Care plans. It checks that the sites we look after are online, both the home page and the newest post, so we hear about an outage before your readers do.
It only checks sites whose owners have connected them to Blog Care with the Phynite Blog Care plugin. It is not a search engine crawler. It doesn’t index or store your content, and it collects nothing about your readers.
How it behaves
User agent
PhyniteMonitor/1.0 (+https://phynitesolutions.com/monitor/)Home page and newest post
Your home page every 3 minutes, and your newest post every 15 minutes. It finds that post by reading your RSS feed a few times a day. About 600 requests a day in all, and no other pages.
Status only
It checks whether your page answers and how quickly. It doesn’t run JavaScript or load images, stylesheets or ads.
10-second timeout
If your page hasn’t answered in 10 seconds, that check counts as a failure. It follows up to 5 redirects, for example to your www address.
Signed requests
Every request is signed with Web Bot Auth, the open standard Cloudflare uses to verify bots, so security services can confirm it’s really us.
PhyniteMonitor runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), so it doesn’t come from a fixed IP address. Use the signature or the user agent to identify it, not an IP list.
Verifying it’s really us
PhyniteMonitor signs each request with an Ed25519 key, following the Web Bot Auth standard (HTTP Message Signatures, RFC 9421). The public key is published here:
https://api.maintenance.phynitesolutions.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory
A request that claims to be PhyniteMonitor but isn’t signed with that key isn’t from us.
If your firewall blocks it
Some security services, Cloudflare in particular, challenge automated requests. When PhyniteMonitor gets a challenge instead of your page, we can’t tell whether your site is up, so we record that check as unknown rather than as an outage. To get full monitoring back, allow PhyniteMonitor through your security settings, or contact us and we’ll help.
robots.txt
PhyniteMonitor follows robots.txt (RFC 9309). It reads your robots.txt once a day and obeys the Allow and Disallow rules for the PhyniteMonitor user agent, or your * rules if there’s no PhyniteMonitor group. A page your robots.txt blocks is never requested. If your robots.txt can’t be read, it keeps following the last copy it read.
To stop PhyniteMonitor entirely:
User-agent: PhyniteMonitorDisallow: /
Blocking it switches off uptime monitoring for your site, and we’ll see that your site isn’t being checked.
How to stop it
PhyniteMonitor stops checking a site when your robots.txt blocks it, when the site is disconnected from the Phynite Blog Care plugin, or when the Blog Care plan ends. If it’s visiting a site you don’t think it should, let us know.
Other Phynite traffic you might see
We also run a daily PageSpeed test on sites in Blog Care. That test is performed by Google’s PageSpeed Insights, so it shows up in your logs as Google’s Lighthouse, not PhyniteMonitor.
Questions?
If PhyniteMonitor is causing a problem on your site, or you have questions about how it works, email support@phynitesolutions.com or use our contact page.