To get started with Private locations, we recommend reading the Private locations article. This gives you an overview of how to monitor your websites, web services, and APIs within your own network, instead of relying on the Uptrends global network of public checkpoint locations.
Requirements and necessary settings
Setting up private locations involves specific hardware and network requirements that vary depending on your environment and implementation. The number of monitors, monitor types, and your network infrastructure can affect your specific needs.
Make sure that you’ve met all the requirements and configurations before installing the checkpoint.
For assistance with prerequisites and setup procedures, please contact our Support team.
Private location capacity
Unlike public checkpoints that run monitors from many different accounts, private locations only run the monitors specific to your account and within your own network.
The resources required to run private locations depend on the type and number of monitors you’re running in each private location. Non browser-based monitors ( HTTPS, Connect, Ping, and Multi-step API) mainly consume network capacity, such as bandwidth, throughput, and latency. Browser-based monitors ( full-page checks and transactions) mainly consume the server capacity, such as CPU, memory, and disk I/O.
Calculation of an average capacity
The average capacity for a private location setup using the recommended hardware requirements with two checkpoints are:
- 2 checkpoints x 10 transactions at 5-minute intervals
- 2 checkpoints x 10 full-page checks at 5-minute intervals
- 100 basic monitors at 1-minute intervals
Note that the monitor run time influences the overall capacity as well.
This setup has extra capacity for error handling and maintenance tasks:
- Confirmed and unconfirmed errors
- Maintenance of one of the checkpoints, such as upgrading containers or the Docker host
Redundancy
The capacity as described above does not take into account redundancy of monitors. There are possible configurations where a private location can handle more monitoring tasks than mentioned above. This is the case when you have redundancy at different levels, such as when using multiple private locations for your monitoring.
Hardware requirements
Before adding a checkpoint, ensure that each checkpoint meets the following hardware specifications defined below. For reliability, we recommend using two checkpoints, and for optimal performance, we recommend using three or more checkpoints.
Resources
| Resources | Recommended | Minimum |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 4 cores | 2 cores |
| RAM | 8 GB | 4 GB |
| Storage | 60 GB on fast storage (SSD) | 60 GB |
Operating systems (OS)
| OS requirements | Recommended | Minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Linux | Debian 12 Bookworm or newer, able to run Docker Engine and Docker Compose | Most mainstream distributions, Docker Engine* |
| Windows | Windows Server 2022 LTSC Standard | Windows Server 2019 LTSC Standard** |
*The host must support and be able to run Docker Engine. Uptrends provides a Docker Compose file, while alternative tools like Podman may also work. Our private location containers are tested on a wide variety of distributions, including Debian (and derivatives like Ubuntu), Rocky Linux, Fedora, Arch Linux, CentOS, and others.
**Please be aware that Docker on Windows Server 2019 has known issues with DNS resolving.
Network requirements
Ensure that you meet the following network requirements:
- IPv4 — fixed IPv4 address for each checkpoint server.
- IPv6 — use this when you use an IPv6 in your monitored infrastructure.
- Network — we recommend at least 1 Gbps for the network connection. The actual usage is between 1-10 Mbps at 95% at constant speed. Ensure you have a stable internet connection to transfer measurement data to the Uptrends platform.
Network Settings
Ensure that you meet all the network configuration:
Firewall
Traffic between the checkpoints and the Uptrends cloud servers should be allowed to pass through without SSL inspection.
Make sure that you do not have Group Policy Objects (GPOs) in place that will prevent Docker from creating a local firewall. For the computer running Docker, set the group policy setting Apply local firewall rules to Yes.
IPv6 requirements
If the internal network is IPv6 enabled, supply a fixed IPv6 address and gateway for each checkpoint server. The IPv6 IP address enables us to monitor your infrastructure through IPv6 with the proper firewall configuration. Without the fixed IPv6 address, Uptrends can only monitor IPv4.
DNS servers
The checkpoint requires one or more DNS servers to be configured on the Docker host. By default, containers will use the DNS configuration from the host to resolve host names for the applications under test and for connectivity to the Uptrends cloud platform.
FCrDNS
If you would like to monitor mail servers through an external route, configure reverse DNS using: checkpoint\_name@uptrends.net to resolve to the corresponding external IP address.