DOCS

Prober offline

What to do when a prober region shows as offline or when monitors are stuck in an unknown state.

What is a prober?

Probers are the distributed agents that execute monitor checks from different geographic regions. If a prober goes offline, monitors assigned to that region stop producing check results and their status becomes stale.

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

Go to Monitors and filter by region (if your plan includes multi-region monitoring).
If multiple monitors in the same region are stale, the prober for that region is likely the cause.
If only one monitor is affected, the issue is more likely with the monitored endpoint itself or a routing problem (DNS, firewall).

Self-managed prober (on-premise / self-hosted)

If you operate your own prober instance:

SSH into the prober host and check the process:

systemctl status xinex-prober
# or for Docker:
docker ps | grep xinex-prober
docker logs xinex-prober --tail 50

Check for connectivity to the HOWLOPS API:

curl -s https://api.example.com/health

Common causes:
- Network firewall blocking outbound HTTPS (443) from the prober host.
- Prober token expired or revoked. Re-register via POST /api/v1/probers/register.
- Clock drift on the prober host causing token validation failures. Ensure NTP is running.
Restart the prober:

systemctl restart xinex-prober
# or:
docker restart xinex-prober

Verify the prober re-registers by checking Admin > Probers (if you have admin access) or by watching the prober logs for a successful registration line.

Cloud-managed prober (HOWLOPS hosted regions)

If the affected region is a HOWLOPS-hosted region (not self-managed), this is a platform incident. Check the HOWLOPS status page for your account to see if a regional outage is posted.

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).

To test reachability: use the Run diagnostic button on the monitor detail page (available on Standard and above tiers).