NTP Pool Monitoring v2

This weekend the system that monitors the NTP servers in the NTP Pool got a major overhaul!

NTP servers are now monitored from a number of monitors across the world, usually closer to the server than the single monitor was before.

One of the most frustrating things about operating an NTP server in the NTP Pool was how random network issues far away from the server would impact the score. Sometimes cause an email to be sent to the operator about potential problems.

Given the far away network issues and that NTP Pool users generally are sent to NTP servers close to them, this wasn’t very helpful.

Our testing over the last year indicates that the new system will perform much better in this regard. It also removes the single monitoring system as a single point of failure (or sometimes just trouble).

There are some technical details about the new system.

During the first days of the new system being in production we found a couple of issues and bugs that caused some server operators to get extra emails about trouble that wasn’t (the opposite of what was intended with the upgrade!). This was resolved the evening of March 20th.

The production rollout and these issues were discussed in the community forum.