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Website monitoring

March 22nd, 2011

Website monitoring is often used by businesses to ensure that their sites are live and responding. Website Security monitoring is also used to verify that a domain (and web site) is not only responding properly, but has not been hacked, blacklisted or hijacked. Multiple tools are available to automate site availability checks and security checks. Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application.

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. Measuring a website’s availability and reliability under various amounts of traffic is often referred to as load testing. 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.

Website monitoring can be done from both inside and outside of a corporate firewall. Traditional Network Management solutions focus on inside the firewall monitoring, whereas external performance monitoring will test and monitor performance issues across the Internet backbone and in some cases all the way to the end-user. Inside firewall monitoring is done by special hardware appliances which can help you determine if your internal applications’ sluggish performance is caused by: design of applications, internal infrastructure, internal applications or connections to any public internet.

Typically, most website monitoring services test your server anywhere between once-per hour to once-per-minute. External performance 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. Website monitoring service can check HTTP pages, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, SSH, Telnet, 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.

These services test a website by remote controlling a large number of web browsers, thus they can also detect websites issues such a Javascript bugs that are browser specific. Time performances: for example an HTTP page should answer in less than 1 second (for a download of 16Ko) to be considered as good. Advanced services offer in-browser web transaction monitoring based on browser addons such as Selenium or iMacros.

Learn more about Website Monitoring. Stop by Ann Marey’s site where you can find out all about Web Hosting Plans and what it can do for you.

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