Cloud hosting and cloud computing companies face some unique challenges when it comes to blacklist monitoring. They manage large pools of IP addresses and domains, reuse those IPs frequently, and need flexible tooling to keep monitoring costs tied to actual usage.
The last thing a cloud provider wants is a customer receiving an IP address that's already blacklisted from a previous tenant. And you shouldn't be paying to monitor addresses that aren't in use.
IP Range Host Type
Most customers add individual IP addresses and domains to the Generator Labs portal. For smaller deployments that's fine, but when you're managing thousands of addresses, individual provisioning becomes unworkable.
To handle this, Generator Labs supports an IP Range host type. You can add a full range or CIDR block (e.g. x.x.x.x/y), and instead of thousands of individual host entries in your account, a single entry represents the entire block. Every IP in the range is still monitored individually behind the scenes.
Whether you're managing a few /24s or a whole /18, the entire block is manageable as a single entry.
API Provisioning
Loading all your IP addresses upfront is one approach, but if you only want to monitor addresses currently allocated to customers, the better option is API-driven provisioning. Several cloud providers integrate directly with the Generator Labs API to enable monitoring as IPs are assigned and disable it when they're released. That way you're only paying for monitoring that has a real business impact.
The API is a simple REST interface that fits into any provisioning workflow in a few lines of code. See the API documentation for details on adding and removing hosts programmatically.
Contact Groups
When a problem is detected, Generator Labs sends alerts via multiple notification channels. Contacts can be organized into groups and assigned per host, so you can have a unique notification target for every address in your account.
Cloud providers can optionally route alerts directly to the affected customer, notifying them about issues with their own IPs and reducing the load on your network operations team.
Start a free trial with Generator Labs and get your IP space under continuous monitoring in minutes.