Authorize.net - Any way to monitor their server?

[midoriweb]

Those of you using them as your payment gateway (like me), had to deal with their outage last Friday. I thought that was a thing of the past, but tonight for some reason I couldn't reach their server for authorizations.

I was able to log into their web interface, my store just couldn't authorize, void, or credit any credit cards. The error from my store software came back and said it was unable to reach server.

So... since I could access [secure.authorize.net...] from my home... why couldn't my server reach the site. Most likely, I'm assuming it's DNS related.

Anyways... now that I'm not so sure about Authorize.net anymore, what IP and port can I monitor to make sure their server is running? I use a monitoring service (hyperspin), and I'd like to add their IP and port to my service so I'll know within minutes if their server is down so I can make changes on my site so I'm not losing any orders.

[rocknbil]

You could automate some sort of cron that periodically connects with the API to run some trivial query . . . but I don't know that they would like or appreciate the overhead bandwidth.

What I do is a bit different, and may work for you. I do all my API queries to gateways with "silent post" using curl. What this means is my server uses curl to post data to the gateway and obtain a response, then process the order without the user ever leaving my sites.

However if the processor cannot be reached or returns one of their registered error codes, it triggers an immediate email notification to me (or the site owner) of a problem connecting. If it delivers the full details of the attempted order (sans CC info) and returns a response to the user that we are aware of the error and will call them (phone is one of the required fields.)

An opinion on A.N., I've worked with them for at least 10 years across many clients, and the recent problems are highly irregular. While the thread here discussing their outage seems to indicate they should have had a better back up plan, in the real world there are lots of things that can break back up plans. My point is, I don't know that this affects my opinion of A.N.'s reliability.

As for continuing problems, the same thing happened when the USPS API went down last year. Seemed like it was weeks before they finally ironed out all the problems, and expect A.N.'s programmers are going through the same hell at the moment.

[ssgumby]

I have code setup that will text message me when an authorization is attempted and fails to inability to connect.

I also have this for Fedex API. Fedex is down quite frequently ... when it goes down I flip a switch to pull UPS rates.