subject: Website Monitoring Software Can Help Ensure You Stay Up And Running [print this page] A website monitoring service is a product that allows website owners to know what the performance of the website is. Generally, it simply simulates the procedure that the normal user would do to access the home page of the website. The amount of time it takes to complete the connection will be measured. A security is going to be sent via email or text messaging when there is a problem.
In complicated cases, there might be an evaluation purchase or test transaction performed in order to test a lot of systems. This is more difficult for both the customer as well as the monitoring service to implement. However, this is an excellent way to thoroughly test a website through an entire sequence of transactions.
How
When using an internet site monitoring service, they frequently provide more details compared to time required to access the website. For example, the service will frequently include the timing of each single HTTP request to the website. This is an excellent way to determine which part of the connection is reducing the knowledge for the user.
In many cases, it may be an HTTP request to an external website that is causing the problem. This can be the case with advertisements on a website that go to the advertisement network for rendering the web page. If that happens, it may be best to temporarily disable ad serving on the website or to get the advertisements fixed as quickly as possible.
Where
There are a number of companies that offer website monitoring software. One of the things that consumers should do is to do some comparison shopping. Of course, price is going to be a very important criteria, especially if more in-depth monitoring such as simulating a transaction is going to be done.
Another thing to look at is the diversity of the monitoring sites. It's really a good idea to have several monitoring sites in different parts of the world. In some cases, an outage may be caused by the Internet service provider or an intermediary provider, especially if there are long distances. It's also a good idea to have monitoring in parts of the world where there are many users.
When
Taking care of that companies need to look at with respect to a website monitoring service is granularity in the monitoring. Some places may only check every five, ten, fifteen or more minutes. That may not be sufficient when a ten minute outage may cost a lot of money.
There are monitoring services as well as end user monitoring packages where the scanning takes place a lot more frequently such as every Thirty seconds or every minute. This is a good way to ensure that a website outage will be noticed faster. The scariest thing that can happen is for an outage to happen just after the last check, and the next one isn't going to occur for the next fifteen minutes.