Verify that FTP servers are reachable and accepting connections. Cloudmon tests FTP availability and connection response time at every polling interval from a configured probe, alerting your team the moment a transfer endpoint becomes unreachable or slow.
FTP Transfer monitoring in Cloudmon actively tests whether an FTP server is reachable and accepting connections at every polling interval. This covers scenarios that standard host or port availability monitoring cannot fully address — an FTP server may appear reachable on TCP port 21 but fail authentication, reject data connections, or time out during the control channel negotiation. Cloudmon's FTP monitor performs a full connection test and records whether the connection succeeded and how long it took.
FTP monitoring is most relevant for environments that depend on scheduled file transfers — backups to a remote FTP host, EDI file exchanges, data pipeline ingestion from SFTP or FTP endpoints, or customer file delivery workflows. A silent FTP failure can go undetected for hours until a downstream process fails because the expected files never arrived. Proactive monitoring detects the failure at the next polling interval, before any downstream impact.
Navigate to Synthetic → Web → FTP Transfer to view all configured FTP monitors.
Navigate to Synthetic → Web → FTP Transfer and click the + button. Fill in the fields as follows:
| Field | Description |
| Probe | The Cloudmon probe that will initiate the FTP connection test. Choose a probe with network access to the FTP server. For external FTP servers, use a probe with internet access. For internal servers, use a probe in the same network segment. |
| Name | A descriptive label for this FTP monitor, such as "Customer Delivery FTP" or "Daily Backup Host". |
| Hostname or IP | The IP address or fully qualified domain name of the FTP server to monitor. |
| Port | The FTP control port. Default is 21. Change this only if the FTP server is configured on a non-standard port. |
| Username | The FTP account username. For anonymous FTP servers, enter anonymous. |
| Password | The FTP account password. For anonymous FTP servers, this field can be left blank or set to any value. |
| Monitoring Profile | The polling and reporting interval for this monitor. Profiles are configured under Settings → Configurations → Monitoring Profiles. |
| Alarm Rule | Select an alarm rule to apply to this FTP monitor from the existing alarm rules configured in Configurations → Alarm Rules. |
| Tags | Optional labels for grouping and filtering this monitor in dashboards and reports. |
Click Save. Cloudmon begins testing the FTP endpoint at the configured interval immediately.
For each FTP monitor, Cloudmon tracks the following:
| Metric | Description |
| Availability | Percentage of polling intervals in which the FTP connection succeeded. A value below 100% indicates a connection failure occurred at that interval. |
| Response Time | Time in milliseconds to establish the FTP control connection and complete the login handshake. Rising response times indicate server-side load or network congestion affecting the FTP path. |
| Downtime | Total duration during which the FTP endpoint was unreachable or returned a connection failure. |
The monitor detail page shows the current status alongside availability and response time charts over the selected time window. The Outages tab lists all recorded downtime periods with start time, end time, and duration.
Each alarm is built around a simple IF/THEN model, where you select a metric, set a threshold, and define what happens when it is breached. Learn more.
To configure an alarm for a specific FTP monitor, navigate to Synthetic → Web → FTP Transfer → [Select Monitor] → Settings → Alarm Rule and click Add Trigger. Available metrics include Availability and Response Time.
| Issue | What to check |
| FTP monitor shows as down but the server is running | Confirm that port 21 (or the configured port) is open from the probe to the FTP server. FTP also requires data channel ports — in passive mode these are negotiated dynamically, and a firewall between the probe and server may block them. Test manually from the probe host using an FTP client to confirm connectivity and authentication. |
| Connection fails after an otherwise successful period | Check whether the FTP account credentials have expired or the password has been rotated. FTP authentication failures appear as connection failures in Cloudmon. Update the credentials in the monitor settings and verify the account is not locked. |
| Response time is consistently high | High FTP connection time indicates either network congestion on the path between the probe and the server, or server-side resource pressure — high CPU, disk I/O saturation, or a large number of concurrent FTP sessions exhausting the server's connection limit. |
| Monitor shows intermittent failures at consistent times | Correlate the failure timestamps with scheduled jobs on the FTP server. A batch process running at the same time may be saturating the server's connection pool or consuming all available disk I/O, causing the monitoring probe's connection to time out. Review the Outages tab timestamps and compare with the server's scheduled task log. |