Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application. Website monitoring is often used by businesses to ensure that their sites are live and responding.
Monitoring is essential to ensure that a website is available to users and downtime is minimized. Users that rely on a website or an application for work or pleasure will get frustrated or even stop using the application if it is not reliably available. Monitoring can cover many things that an application needs to function, like network connectivity, Domain Name System records, database connectivity, bandwidth, and computer resources like free RAM, CPU load, disk space, events, etc. Commonly measured metrics are response time and availability (or uptime), but consistency and reliability metrics are gaining popularity.
[edit] Inside or outside monitoring
Website monitoring can be done from both inside and outside of a corporate firewall. External performance monitoring will test and monitor performance issues across the Internet backbone and in some cases all the way to the end-user.
External monitoring is also known as end-user monitoring or end-to-end performance monitoring.
Real user monitoring measures the performance and availability experienced by actual users, diagnoses individual incidents, and tracks the impact of a change. Advanced Services such as AlertFox runs these test in real web browser, thereby measuring the true end-user experience.
Modern website monitoring services such as AlertFox Website Monitoring can check HTTP pages, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, SSH, SSL, TCP, PING, Domain Name Expiry, SSL Certificate Expiry and a range of other ports with great variety of check intervals from every 4 hours to every one minute. Typically, most website monitoring services test your server anywhere between once-per hour to once-per-minute.
Advanced services offer in-browser web transaction monitoring based on browser addons such as iMacros. These services test a website by remote controlling a large number of Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers, thus they can also detect websites issues such a Javascript bugs that are browser specific. Services that use iMacros can even monitor AJAX, Flash, Silverlight and Java applets. Currently there is only one free website monitoring service available that offers free transaction monitoring.
Time performances: for example an HTTP page should answer in less than 1 second (for a download of 16Ko) to be considered as “good”. citation needed
You may monitor a single page of your website, but you can also monitor a complete business process (often referred to as multi-step transactions).
There are two main types of website monitoring
* Synthetic monitoring also known as active monitoring, and
* Passive monitoring also known as real monitoring.
As the information brought by website monitoring services is in most cases urgent and may be of crucial importance, various notification methods, often known as “alerts” are used: e-mail, IM, regular and cell phones, SMS, fax, pagers, Skype, etc.
More information about website monitoring, and links to free website monitoring services, can be found at the AlertFox Website Monitoring Wiki.
* Synthetic monitoring also known as active monitoring, and
* Passive monitoring also known as real monitoring.
As the information brought by website monitoring services is in most cases urgent and may be of crucial importance, various notification methods, often known as “alerts” are used: e-mail, IM, regular and cell phones, SMS, fax, pagers, Skype, etc.
More information about website monitoring, and links to free website monitoring services, can be found at the AlertFox Website Monitoring Wiki.
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