CheckCentral Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

While backup job monitoring was the initial focus, CheckCentral can parse any incoming email you send it. There are also integrations for applications that do not send emails, such as RAID statuses and website certificate expirations. You can find the integrations here: Integration Scripts.

We do have an API. With our API you can read and manage most elements of your CheckCentral account, including checks, statuses, check groups, users, reports, dashboards, and more. The daily rate limit is 10000.

For examples, including API structure and conditions, see our guides under the API section here: Support Guides.

If for any reason you're unable to send notification emails to email hostnames with the .cc TLD, use the .com TLD instead, keeping the rest of the email address the same.

You can have up to 5 checks for free. The next account level is Enterprise, which begins at 10 checks, increasing by multiples of 10 (20, 30, 40, etc.). Checks are priced at $5 per 10 checks per month. 50 checks, for example, would be $25 per month.

A check is simply the monitoring configuration for one job, a backup job, for example. Regardless of how many systems/servers are listed in each job's notification message or how many times the job runs in a month or how many messages are sent, each job equals ONE check.

Pricing discounts are available for quarterly (5%) and yearly (10%) advance payments.

To start a trial, you'll need to create an account and an organization. Click Account Login to begin. Follow all the prompts and fill in the necessary details, and choose your subscription, which includes the number of checks for your organization. This number can be altered at any point and there is no limit during the trial. See the Beginner's Guide for more detail: Beginner's Guide.

There are NO onboarding or support fees, and we offer a free, 60-day trial of the full service. For more pricing details, see How is pricing calculated?

Navigate to the Subscription page via the Organization menu.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Update Billing Info." This will take you to a secure external page where you can enter your billing and payment information.

There is two-factor authentication available for logins (set via the individual user account) as well as support for single sign-on (SSO). The SSO settings for Azure and Google Workspaces are found in Organization > Settings.

For more on CheckCentral security integrations, see CheckCentral Security.

Yes. You can create multiple unique, customized dashboards with filtered data and specific layouts. To begin, go to Dashboards > Manage Dashboards. Your default dashboard will already be listed. To edit this dashboard, click the pencil icon to the right.

Here you can rename the dashboard, enable/disable content, filter which check groups and check labels are displayed, and choose the users and user groups which can access it. *User and user group selection will override the check group selections based on their access.

To create an additional dashboard, click "Add Dashboard," filling in the same information listed in the previous paragraph.

You can also make a dashboard publicly accessible by clicking the gray dot in the row of the dashboard list. It will turn green and create a link which can be shared with anyone, whether they are a CheckCentral user or not.

There are several options when accessing CheckCentral organization data.

With individual and group user permissions, you can limit access to particular check groups and customize the user's ability to manage checks. This ranges from full administrator privileges to read-only access.

For MSPs who wish to give clients limited access to their own data, administrators can create clients as CheckCentral users with particular access permissions or simply provide them with public URLs to relevant dashboards and/or email them summarized reports, keeping them at arms length from the CheckCentral portal.

The logos on the reports are pulled from the organization logo, which is set in Organization > Settings. This cannot be customized per report, but removing your custom organization logo will remove it from reports.

The core of CheckCentral is checks. These are configurable, automated programs used to set a system/software status based on details provided from incoming email messages. (For example, when a backup service sends an email to report the successful run of a backup process, a check scans that email and sets a visual status indicator to mark the success.)

For understanding of a check in relation to pricing, see How is pricing calculated?

The Schedule section of a check addresses the expected arrival patterns of incoming emails and when CheckCentral should declare an expected email to be overdue. This section is not for setting the actual arrival times for emails; the arrival time is automatically set based on real-world receipt of the email.

Once an email arrival time is automatically set, its expected interval configuration will go into effect, looking for the next incoming email/message. For example, if a notification email arrives at noon and its check is set for every half hour, it will expect another notification email at 12:30.

The custom or irregular schedule portion of the Schedule section is about excluding active days and times for declaring emails as overdue. For example, if there is a backup job that only runs Monday to Friday, deselecting the active days checkboxes for Saturday and Sunday ensures the check won't be marked as overdue when emails don't arrive on Saturday or Sunday.

If the emails are sent on a regular schedule for only part of the day, a job that reports hourly from 7am to 5pm, for instance, setting the active time window from 7am to 5pm will prevent overdue notices for times outside that window. Emails may still arrive outside active days and time windows, which will continue to set the check status, but will not influence overdue declarations.

When you need to add more checks to your subscription, you can do so from your subscription page.

Navigate to the subscription page via the "Organization" tab in the main menu. In the upper-right of the subscription page, click "Add or Remove Checks." A prompt will display with a sliding selector. Choose the number of checks you need and click "Save."

Your bill will be prorated according to where you are in your billing cycle.

In the Identification section of check configuration is the field, Asset ID. This is a means of associating a check with an asset as defined in an external PSA/ticketing system. At the moment, Asset ID usage is limited to Halo PSA. To properly use the Asset ID field, the ID in the check configuration must exactly match the PSA/ticketing system asset name.

For more on the use of Asset IDs, see the HaloPSA Integration guide.

Yes it does. It currently integrates with 16 (Atera, Autotask, Bugzilla, ConnectWise Manage, Freshdesk, Freshservice, GitHub, GitLab, HaloPSA, Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Kaseya BMS, Microsoft To Do List, Redmine, SyncroMSP, and Zendesk).

Complete ticket management is part of each integration. Any check with a failure status initiates a ticket in the integrated ticketing system for the relevant customer. When additional status information is received, the same ticket is updated. When the status of the check returns to success, the ticket is closed.

Some external PSAs and ticketing systems allow linking tickets directly to customers. This is currently limited to Atera, Autotask, ConnectWise, HaloPSA, Kaseya, and SyncroMSP.

Once a PSA/external ticketing system is properly configured in CheckCentral, the system's customer (AKA company or account) data can be pulled in for ticket association. By clicking the customer/company/account button in the configuration window of the PSA/ticketing system, a customer can be chosen from the populated list.

Any ticket managed by CheckCentral for check groups associated with the configured PSA/ticketing system will be linked to the chosen customer. One or more check groups can be selected for each system's selected customer and multiple configurations can be made using the same ticketing system.

For a more efficient linking of tickets to customers, there is the "Automatically select customer based on check group name" option. This is available through the customer/company/account button and would be selected in lieu of a single customer. When a check status creates or updates a ticket in the configured PSA/ticketing system, it will then use the check's associated check group to match the PSA/ticketing system's customer.

To guarantee matching of check groups to customer names in a PSA/ticketing system, there is an import option. This is currently limited to Atera, Autotask, ConnectWise, HaloPSA, and SyncroMSP. By clicking the import button above the configured PSA ticketing system, you can select from a list of your customers to be added as check groups into CheckCentral. Checks added to those check groups will then have their tickets associated with that customer.

Some PSA/ticketing systems allow configuration of statuses when managing tickets. These can be found in the configuration prompt of the system and are currently limited to Kaseya, Halo, ConnectWise (service board status and close status), and Autotask. Open the configuration prompt for the given PSA/ticketing system, click the search button by the status field, and select a status from the populated list.

A string without quotes, brackets, or mustaches ({ and }) will be treated as a "Match Any Word" search if multiple words are specified. To search for an exact string, you can wrap the string in quotes and use the equality operator (see below).

Note: If you'd like to search for text that contains invalid characters (such as brackets or special characters), you'll need to wrap the string in quotes. For example, if you'd like to find part of a function in your source code files, enter the following (including the quotes) in the Query box: "MyFunction("

You can use the +, OR and - operators to create more advanced search queries. Operators are not case-sensitive, but capitalizing them can improve the readability of your search query.

The + operator will only match if the text contains both of the query terms. Here are some examples:

Match anything that has both cats and dogs: cats +dogs

Match anything that has all 4 animals (cats, dogs, horses, cows): cats +dogs +horses +cows

The OR operator is represented as a space between string matches. It will match anything that has at least one of your query terms:

Match anything that has either cats or dogs: cats dogs

Match anything that has any of the 4 animals: cats dogs horses cows

Using the - operator will match anything that doesn't have the query term in it. Here are some examples:

Match anything without the word dogs: -dogs

Match anything that doesn't contain dogs or cats: -(dogs cats) -dogs -cats

You can use multiple operators together, to form more complex queries. Here are some examples:

Match anything that doesn't contain cats, but does contain dogs, or contains fish: -cats +dogs OR fish ((-cats) +dogs) OR fish

When more than one operator is used in a query, - is processed first, then +, then OR. To change the precedence of operators, use brackets to separate different statements in your query, much like how you would in an arithmetic expression. Brackets may also improve the readability of your queries, and do not affect performance. Here are some examples:

In this example, dogs and birds will be evaluated first because + has a higher precedence than OR: cats dogs +birds

To change the meaning of the example above, use brackets: (cats dogs) +birds

The example below has the same meaning as the first example, but is much easier to understand: (dogs +birds) cats

You can use the - operator to invert the meaning of a bracketed query. The query below will search for all text that doesn't contain dogs, or doesn't contain cats: -(dogs +cats)

The query below will search for either cats or dogs, but not both: (dogs cats) -(dogs +cats)

You can search for exact phrase matches, even ones that contain operators, by using quotes. Here is an example:

This example will search for the exact phrase "dogs +cars are great", the + operator is ignored because it is in quotes: "dogs +cars are great"

To search for quotes within text, escape the character with a backslash (as shown below) to tell the query that you are searching for quotes, and not searching for a phrase.

The example below will search for "dogs" (with the quotes) in the search text: \"dogs\"

To specify the number of times a phrase should be matched, use the match count operator. The amount can be any positive whole number, including zero.

The example below will match the phrase dogs if it is found exactly 3 times: dogs{3}

To match text exactly, you can use the equality modifier on a search term.

The example below will match the phrase "dogs", but will not match things like "dogs and cats": ==dogs

To look for specific words in text, you can use the word boundary modifier.

The example below will match the phrases "dogs" or "dogs and cats", but will not match things like "hotdogs": =dogs

You can still use other operators with the word boundary and equality modifiers, and you can also wrap terms in quotes to include spaces and other special characters

The example below will match any text that is not exactly equal to "cats and dogs": -=="cats and dogs"

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