Monitoring for Provider Outages: Scripts and Alerts for Torrent Admins

Stop guessing — detect provider outages before users flood your support queue

As a torrent site admin in 2026 you face two recurring risks: provider outages (Cloudflare, AWS) that cascade into user-impact, and noisy, slow incident responses that cost uptime and trust. This guide gives you reusable scripts, Prometheus alert rules, and a practical runbook so you can detect, triage, and mitigate provider outages before your user base feels it.

Why this matters in 2026

Late 2025 and early 2026 saw multiple high-profile incidents where centralized edge providers and cloud control planes produced fast-spreading, hard-to-diagnose outages. Media outlets reported spikes in outage reports for Cloudflare and AWS in mid-January 2026. For torrent platforms — which depend on predictable connectivity for trackers, magnet resolution, and web frontends — these outages perform worse than simple HTTP errors: they break torrent discovery, magnet resolution, and DHT seeding coordination.

Trend highlights that affect monitoring strategy:

• Edge centralization: Many sites rely on the same CDN and DNS providers; outages can affect many independent sites simultaneously.
• Multi-cloud hybridization: Teams deploy across AWS, other clouds, and edge CDNs — which increases blast radius complexity.
• Observability advances: eBPF, synthetic multi-region probes, and AI-assisted anomaly detection are becoming operational staples (and should feed Prometheus).

Monitoring approach — three layers you must instrument

1. Synthetic probes from multiple networks and regions (HTTP, TCP, DNS, TLS).
2. Provider telemetry via status APIs (Cloudflare, AWS Health) and BGP/RPKI monitoring when possible.
3. Application health inside your infra (tracker RPC success, swarm formation metrics, ingress error rates).

Core principles

• Probe from at least three independent networks (cloud, colo, residential)
• Differentiate between provider-level and origin-level failures
• Automate safe mitigations and human-in-the-loop escalations

Reusable tooling: scripts, exporter configs, and Prometheus rules

Below are tested, reusable components you can drop into your observability platform. They assume a Prometheus + Alertmanager stack and optional Pushgateway for short-lived probe results. All scripts use single quotes to make embedding in automation easier.

1) Multi-network synthetic probe script (shell)

This script runs from a host (or cron job) and performs DNS, TCP, and HTTP checks against your site and edge endpoints. It emits Prometheus-compatible metrics via the Pushgateway.

# multi_probe.sh - run synthetic checks and push to Prometheus Pushgateway
# usage: ./multi_probe.sh mysite.example.com pushgateway:9091 job=myprobe instance=us-east-1
TARGET='$1'
PUSHGATEWAY='$2'
JOB_LABEL='$3'

# helpers
push_metric(){
  local name="$1"
  local value="$2"
  local labels="$3"
  cat < /tmp/tcp_ok
tcp_ok=$(cat /tmp/tcp_ok)
push_metric 'probe_tcp_connect' "$tcp_ok" "{target=''$TARGET'',port='443'}"

# done
echo 'pushed metrics to '$PUSHGATEWAY

2) Blackbox exporter config (Prometheus)

Leverage Prometheus' blackbox_exporter to run HTTP/TCP/DNS/ICMP probes from multiple scrape targets. Use three scrape jobs: regionally distributed collectors, RIPE/Atlas if available, and a residential probe fleet.

# blackbox.yml - probe modules
modules:
  http_2xx:
    prober: http
    timeout: 10s
  tcp_connect:
    prober: tcp
    timeout: 5s
  dns:
    prober: dns
    timeout: 5s

Prometheus scrape_config excerpt:

# prometheus.yml snippet
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'blackbox-http'
    metrics_path: /probe
    params:
      module: [http_2xx]
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['mysite.example.com']
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        target_label: __param_target
      - source_labels: [__param_target]
        target_label: instance
      - target_label: __address__
        replacement: blackbox-exporter-us:9115  # per-region exporter

3) Prometheus Alerting rules for provider outage detection

These rules focus on patterns that indicate provider-level problems rather than isolated origin issues.

# alerts.yml - provider outage focused rules
groups:
- name: provider-outages
  rules:
  - alert: Provider_HTTP_Probe_Failure
    expr: avg_over_time(probe_http_status{job='blackbox-http'}[3m]) < 200
    for: 2m
    labels:
      severity: critical
    annotations:
      summary: 'HTTP probe failures for {{ $labels.instance }}'
      description: 'HTTP probes from multiple regions are consistently returning non-2xx codes.'

  - alert: Provider_DNS_Failure_MultiResolver
    expr: (sum by (instance)(probe_dns_success{resolver='1.1.1.1'}) < 1) and (sum by (instance)(probe_dns_success{resolver='8.8.8.8'}) < 1)
    for: 2m
    labels:
      severity: critical
    annotations:
      summary: 'DNS resolution failed via public resolvers for {{ $labels.instance }}'
      description: 'Likely provider or authoritative DNS issue; check Cloudflare/DNS provider status.'

  - alert: Elevated_TCP_Connect_Failures
    expr: increase(probe_tcp_connect{port='443'}[5m]) < 0
    for: 3m
    labels:
      severity: warning
    annotations:
      summary: 'TCP connect failures increasing to {{ $labels.instance }}'
      description: 'Possible network or edge provider connectivity issue.'

  - alert: MultiRegion_Latency_Spike
    expr: histogram_quantile(0.95, sum(rate(probe_http_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le)) > 2
    for: 5m
    labels:
      severity: warning
    annotations:
      summary: '95th percentile probe latency > 2s'
      description: 'High latency across regions; could indicate upstream provider degradation.'

4) Alertmanager routing and automated mitigation webhook

Design routes keyed by severity. For critical provider outage alerts, call a webhook that triggers a documented, reversible mitigation (DNS failover, disable CDN proxying, or enable fallback trackers).

# alertmanager.yml snippet
route:
  group_by: ['alertname']
  group_wait: 10s
  group_interval: 1m
  repeat_interval: 2h
  receiver: 'slack-pager'
  routes:
    - match:
        severity: 'critical'
      receiver: 'pagerduty'
      continue: true
    - match:
        alertname: 'Provider_DNS_Failure_MultiResolver'
      receiver: 'auto-mitigate-webhook'
receivers:
- name: 'auto-mitigate-webhook'
  webhook_configs:
  - url: 'https://incident-runner.internal/_/webhook/provider-mitigation'

Automation: safe mitigation scripts

Always mark these automated actions as reversible and require a manual confirmation for unsafe actions. Below are two safe, common mitigations: Route53 DNS failover and Cloudflare DNS swap (switch proxy off to bypass CDN).

Route53 failover using AWS CLI

This script swaps A records to a known origin IP when the primary record is flagged as unreachable. Use low TTL (60s) during incidents to minimize propagation delays.

# route53_failover.sh
# usage: ./route53_failover.sh ZONE_ID 'mysite.example.com' '203.0.113.10'
ZONE_ID='$1'
RECORD_NAME='$2'
ORIGIN_IP='$3'

cat > /tmp/route53-change.json <

# cloudflare_toggle_proxy.sh
# usage: ./cloudflare_toggle_proxy.sh ZONE_ID RECORD_ID ORIGIN_IP api_token
ZONE_ID='$1'
RECORD_ID='$2'
ORIGIN_IP='$3'
API_TOKEN='$4'

curl -s -X PUT 'https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/'$ZONE_ID'/dns_records/'$RECORD_ID \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer '$API_TOKEN \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{"type":"A","name":"'$RECORD_NAME'","content":"'$ORIGIN_IP'","proxied":false}'