How Can I monitor recaptcha validation service?

[Luis]

Hi,
We are using one of the ips for the verification service because we
cant configure our firewall for all the published ips and because we
dont have access to DNS in our dmz.
But we need to monitor if the recaptcha service is running, to take
some action in case the service is not available.
How should we monitor that service?
Perhaps the best way is to configure our monitor to send validation
requests with the same data, and check if we receive response
( incorrect answer ).
Do you have any other idea?
Thanks

[Adrian Godong]

I am sure reCAPTCHA returns something else (or the API will throw a
different error) if the service is unavailable.

--
Adrian Godong
adrian...@gmail.com

[don]

Hi,
I also want to do this, perhaps using the AJAX API?
Need to provide an alternate means of validation if re-captcha is
down?

Did you find any other way of polling for monitoring site
availability?

don

[Joe_e]

It's in the API:
The error response code you get is: 'recaptcha-not-reachable'
The API says "reCAPTCHA never returns this error code. A plugin should
manually return this code in the unlikely event that it is unable to
contact the reCAPTCHA verify server."

However that is only if a user submits your form, I am guessing you
want to check the reCaptcha server is up before attempting to grab the
js code et al and serve them up a different form of verification.
As far as I can tell there isn't anything the API's to do this.
If you're using PHP or server side language, the best you can do is
request the page headers from the reCaptcha URL, and check you don't
get an error 404.

As for AJAX - if you're loading the reCaptcha JS code using AJAX it
should be relatively simple to detect if the file doesn't load.

[Bala De plata]

Thanks Joe,
Yes, I need to monitor recaptcha from another system that is outside our applications, and if we know that the services is unavailable, then we could for example disable recaptcha validation without affecting the users.
But I would not  like that that monitoring could cause that recaptcha site blocks my monitor.

2009/6/25 Joe_e <joe....@gmail.com>

[Balasubramanian G]

I have a question. What is the frequency of the downtime in reCAPTCHA service? I'm asking this since people are so worried about monitoring the service..

Warm Regards
Balasubramanian
www.icreatesoftwares.co.cc, www.yourtanpura.co.cc, www.quizmasterpro.co.cc

[Joe_e]

I think the down-time is very low, if any - it hosted across multiple
distributed servers.
However it would be nice to have a way to tell *if* it was down.
Hopefully one of the reCaptcha team can give us their recommended
solution.

[reCAPTCHA Support]

Hi,

Over 2 years of operation, we have had no incidents which made reCAPTCHA completely unavailable. Using a distributed network of redundant datacenters has allowed us to achieve this record of uptime.

There have been a few incidents where reCAPTCHA was inaccessible from a specific region -- for example, when dealing with a specific ISP that had connectivity problems. These types of problems are typical of all internet sites and when they occur tend to affect many websites.

In terms of monitoring our service, we suggest that you focus not on attempting to make sure our service is working, but that your service is working. For example, if your site typically registers 10,000 users per hour (each of which must solve a CAPTCHA), you should monitor that number. Failures often occur in strange ways (for example, we've seen cases where newly introduced code creates a problem even though our servers are working fine). Rather than try to anticipate all the possible modes of failure, you should monitor the metrics that are important to your profitability.

One other thing you can use is checking the occurrence of network errors when contacting api-verify.recaptcha.net (eg, network not reachable errors, or HTTP return codes like 404 or 500). This might indicate a local routing issue between you and reCAPTCHA. As long as calls to the verification service work, additional checks (such as trying to generate CAPTCHAs) are very much redundant -- our code has many checks to make sure that as long as our servers are reachable, we are able to serve CAPTCHAs.

- Ben

--
reCAPTCHA: stop spam, read books
http://recaptcha.net

[Daniel Serodio]

Does this advice about api-verify.recaptcha.net still apply? I'm getting a 302 redirect to www.google.com when I GET http://api-verify.recaptcha.net/

Thanks in advance,

Daniel Serodio

[Adrian Godong]

*.recaptcha.net is no longer in use. Use the new address on google.com.

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--
Adrian Godong
adrian...@gmail.com

[Daniel Serodio]

Is there a URL on google.com specific for monitoring, similar in purpose to api-verify.recaptcha.net ?

Regards,

Daniel Serodio