What Type of Web Monitoring Service Does Your Website Need?

Website monitoring is a term used for the process of testing and verifying the availability, performance and functionality of your website. It is a tool that allows assessing of the users experience with your site and verifying if the users are interacting with your site as expected. Though website monitoring is important, some websites have not given it serious thought nor put in place an appropriate monitoring system. For some websites, their employees may check it periodically and bring issues to the notice of the webmaster. Such types of site checks are sporadic, inefficient and time consuming.  Moreover, manual testing cannot assess all the variables that influence a site’s availability and performance. You need an automated method to improve the quality and efficiency of website monitoring.

Not only will a monitoring service track the uptime and other performance metrics of the website from time to time but also the service will immediately report if a page or a website element fails to work as expected. Services that you can expect from a decent website monitoring service are outlined below.

Uptime monitoring

The role of uptime monitoring is making sure your website is accessible and to some extent uptime monitoring also checks for some basic functionality of the site. Another important aspect of this type of monitoring is to check whether the website is available from different locations around the globe. Uptime monitoring service providers maintain their monitoring servers at different places around the world to enable this functionality.

Performance monitoring

Today, internet users are impatient. Whether they are trying to load your website from a desktop or a mobile they want it to load fast. Therefore, tracking speed or performance of your site is important. Service providers will monitor browser load time and connection speed. They will check if each element of a page is downloaded properly or not. If there is any error, missing content or slow performance then alerts will be sent out. Website performance enables good user experience and performance monitoring is done to keep an eye on this aspect of customer interaction with your website.

Functionality monitoring

Various errors and issues could be preventing your website from working correctly thereby causing much inconvenience and irritating your website’s visitors. Such problems cannot be detected with performance or uptime monitoring functionality. For monitoring sites for functionality, the service providers of website monitoring create scripts that simulate the interaction of the users with the various features of your website and its web applications. If the performance of the website functionality is not as per the pre-defined scripts, the monitoring system will generate alerts and inform you which specific functionality is not working as expected.

Internal monitoring

It runs inside a company firewall and monitors the web server from inside the machine. The service is helpful to monitor metrics like CPU load time, memory usage, disk space and page load times. It offers real time updates about the strength and the well-being of the web server.  This type of monitoring is especially helpful to identify or anticipate performance issues caused by hardware components that need to be upgraded and are insufficient to handle the current traffic load on the server. The advantage of using internal monitoring is to have a clear picture about your system health beforehand. The main drawback of this service is that it is internal. If your server goes down, you will not be able to realize an outage until you find it yourself.

External monitoring

External monitoring is done from outside your corporate firewall can track load times, usage, memory among other parameters. In addition, it can check your site’s response time and integrity of different ports along the network and the site content.  Visitors access your site from multiple locations and through various internet service providers. The outage experienced by your website could be for many external reasons and may not be caused by your own server or your internet connection. External monitoring is helpful in identifying issues that impact your website uptime and that arise due to any link in the World Wide Web not working properly.

When your server is down or hangs it loses its ability to communicate and send warning messages to you. One of the advantages of external monitoring over the internal monitoring is that it can work even when the website server is down. If the external monitoring service detects a problem, it will inform you. Many good website monitoring services track uptime from multiple servers, so that they can reliably and accurately assess downtime and inform you.

When the online businesses component is significant for an organization, it’s essential to do web site monitoring. While the site monitoring service is an absolute necessity, the specific needs vary from one business to another. There is a need to audit, assess and decide what will be the right type of monitoring service that will be suitable for your website.