Prober offline

What is a prober?

Probers are the agents that execute monitor checks from geographic regions. When an assigned prober disappears, HowlOps usually hands its work to another prober in the same country first, and only spreads the orphaned work across the remaining online probers fleet-wide when no prober in that country is available. During some incident-response conditions, orphaned work goes straight to the wider fleet instead of staying in-country. Either way, the monitor keeps being checked, so a regional outage can reduce location-specific evidence without stopping every affected monitor.

Symptoms

• Monitors show a "No recent data" or stale status badge.
• The monitor detail page shows check results stopped at a specific time.
• You receive an internal system notification that a prober region is unavailable.

Diagnose the scope

1. Go to Monitors and filter by region. Region selection is available when the workspace's current Uptime capability includes multi-region monitoring.
2. If multiple monitors in the same region are stale, the prober for that region is likely the cause.
3. If only one monitor is affected, the issue is more likely with the monitored endpoint itself or a routing problem (DNS, firewall).

Hosted and remote probers

HowlOps operates the hosted checking fleet. A separately deployed remote prober can also register with the platform, so first establish whether the affected region is hosted or managed by your team.

If a hosted region is affected, check the HowlOps status page. For a remote prober, check its process health, registration, outbound connectivity to the API, and local spill-buffer status before rotating credentials or re-registering it.

If no incident is posted and monitors in multiple cloud regions are affected, contact support and include:

• Affected monitor IDs.
• The approximate time the issue started.
• The X-Request-Id from any failed API calls if available.

Monitor shows "unknown" status

A monitor in "unknown" state has not completed a check cycle since it was created or resumed. Possible causes:

• The prober has not yet picked up the new monitor. Allow up to one full check interval.
• The prober is offline (see above).
• The monitor URL is unreachable from the prober's network (DNS failure, private IP, firewall).

If the workspace has the network_diagnostics capability, open the monitor detail and use Run now in the traceroute card. The card is hidden when that capability is unavailable. Current availability is shown on the pricing page.

See also

• Missing notifications
• FAQ - common errors