subject: Website Monitoring 101 [print this page] Keeping your Website performing consistently and available at all times is essential to the success of your online business. Website monitoring helps you ensure that your Website is functioning optimally and is accessible to Internet users every second. From checking Website average load time on a regular basis to alerting you of problems from locations around the world, a good vendor guarantees that your Website functions flawlessly.
What Is Website Monitoring?
Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a Website or Web application from different locations through the day. Website monitoring is used to ensure that sites are live and responding to viewers, to generate trends that show performance over time, and highlight a range of factors that could affect the functionality of a Website. Website monitoring services also help you benchmark your Website against the performance of your competitors to help you determine how well your site is performing.
What Does Website Monitoring Involve?
To ensure that your site is up and performing at peak performance at all times, Website monitoring services provide special servers called monitoring agents, located all over the world. These Website monitoring agents check your website at a set frequency and perform test transactions of your Website based on a predetermined script. Website monitoring agents warn you when they detect that your Website is inaccessible or performing poorly. If one or more monitoring agents report downtime, an alert message is sent to your Web operations team.
Advantages of Website Monitoring
A Website that is frequently inaccessible is likely to destroy customer loyalty and lose business. Ensuring that all of the elements of a Website are functioning properly is critical to maximizing your company's Web investment. A good vendor offers several advantages:
24x7 monitoring of all key areas of Website and Web applications
Quick and accurate notification of problem when it occurs notification
Web-based real-time reporting of historical data
Easy setup and immediate results, with no software or hardware to maintain
Multiple Internet location monitoring for a holistic view of end-to-end connectivity for geographically distributed users
An accurate view from the end-user perspective
Features of a Good Website Monitoring Service
Advanced Website monitoring service is capable of carrying out multistep Website transactions. They also offer several capabilities through a dashboard to set up tasks in Website monitoring accounts. features include,
Complete monitoring and reporting for uptime and performance using user defined Web transactions
Real browser-based Website monitoring for the most accurate read on performance
Robust alerting mechanisms to deliver trouble notifications to multiple points
Complete monitoring to ensure that there are no faults within pages, including examination of referenced objects, SSL certificates, and page content
User-friendly transactional monitoring, with the ability to capture each business process
Geographically dispersed monitoring locations so that Websites and Web applications using different Internet backbones can be accessed
Root-cause analysis of problems when they occur
For maximum control over your Website, it must be transparent and the measurements it provides must be accurate.
