Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

as expected. Website monitoring are often used by businesses to ensure website

uptime Uptime is a Measurement, measure of system reliability, expressed as the period of system time, time a machine, typically a computer, has been continuously working and available. Uptime is the opposite of downtime. It is often used as a measure ...

, performance, and functionality is as expected. Website monitoring companies provide organizations the ability to consistently monitor a website or server function and observe how it responds. The monitoring is often conducted from several locations around the world to a specific website, or server, to detect issues related to general Internet latency, and network hop issues, and to prevent false positives caused by local or inter-connect problems. Monitoring companies generally report on these tests in a variety of reports, charts, and graphs. When an error is detected monitoring services send out alerts via email, SMS, phone,

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior. Devices that typically su ...

trap, a pager that may include diagnostic information, such as a network traceroute, code capture of a web page's HTML file, a screenshot of a webpage, and even a video of a website failing. These diagnostics allow

network administrator A network administrator is a person designated in an organization whose responsibility includes maintaining computer infrastructures with emphasis on local area networks (LANs) up to wide area networks (WANs). Responsibilities may vary between or ...

s and webmasters to correct issues faster. Run dail
web page performance test
which help you to monitor your website performance. Monitoring gathers extensive data on website performance, such as load times, server response times, and page element performance that is often analyzed and used to further optimize website performance.

Purpose

Monitoring is essential to ensure that a website is available to users,

downtime In computing and telecommunications, downtime (also (system) outage or (system) drought colloquially) is a period when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is ...

is minimized, and performance can be optimized. 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 The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information ...

records, database connectivity, bandwidth, and computer resources like free

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

, CPU load, disk space, events, etc. Commonly measured metrics are response time and

availability In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings: * The degree to which a system, subsystem or equipment is in a specified operable and committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at ...

(or

), 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. Website monitoring also helps benchmark the website against the performance of a competitor to help determine how well a site is performing. Website speed is also used as a metric for

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

rankings. Website monitoring can be used to hold web hosting providers accountable for their service-level agreements. Most web hosts offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and when uptime is less than that, individuals can be refunded for the excessive downtime. Not all hosts will refund individuals for excessive downtime so one must become familiar with the terms of service of their host. Most paid website monitoring services will also offer security features such as

virus A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living Cell (biology), cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Viruses are ...

and

malware Malware (a portmanteau of ''malicious software'')Tahir, R. (2018)A study on malware and malware detection techniques . ''International Journal of Education and Management Engineering'', ''8''(2), 20. is any software intentionally designed to caus ...

scanning which is of growing importance as websites become more complicated and integral to the business.

Internal vs. external

Website monitoring can be done from both ''inside'' and ''outside'' of a corporate firewall. Traditional

network management Network management is the process of administering and managing computer networks. Services provided by this discipline include fault analysis, performance management, provisioning of networks and maintaining quality of service. Network managem ...

solutions focus on ''inside the firewall monitoring'', whereas ''external performance monitoring'' will test and monitor performance issues across the

Internet backbone The Internet backbone is the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected computer networks and core routers of the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity network ...

and in some cases all the way to the

end-user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrato ...

. Third-party website performance monitoring solutions can monitor internal (behind the firewall), external (customer-facing), or cloud-based Web applications. Inside the firewall, monitoring is done by special hardware appliances which can help you determine if your internal applications’ sluggish performance is caused by: the design of applications, internal infrastructure, internal applications or connections to any public Internet. External performance monitoring is also known as end-user monitoring or end-to-end performance monitoring.

Real user monitoring Real user monitoring (RUM) is a passive monitoring technology that records all user interaction with a website or client interacting with a server or cloud-based application. Monitoring actual user interaction with a website or an application is i ...

measures the performance and availability experienced by actual users, diagnoses individual incidents, and tracks the impact of a change.

Measures of website availability

Types of protocol

A website monitoring service can check other internet protocols besides

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

pages and

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protoc ...

such as

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typi ...

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Today, POP version 3 (POP3) is the most commonly used version. Together with IMAP, i ...

, ActiveSync,

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

, DNS, SSH,

Telnet Telnet (sometimes stylized TELNET) is a client-server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main ...

, SSL, TCP, PING, UDP, SOAP, Domain Name Expiry, SSL Certificate Expiry and a range of ports. Monitoring frequency occurs at intervals of once every 4-hours to every 15-seconds. Typically, most website monitoring services test a server, or application, between a once-per-hour per once-per-minute. Advanced monitoring services capture browser interactions with websites using macro recorders, or browser add-ons such as

Selenium Selenium is a chemical element; it has symbol (chemistry), symbol Se and atomic number 34. It has various physical appearances, including a brick-red powder, a vitreous black solid, and a grey metallic-looking form. It seldom occurs in this elem ...

or iMacros. These services test a website by running a web browser through a typical website transaction (such as a shopping cart) or a custom scenario, in order to check for user experience issues, performance problems, and availability errors. Browser-driven monitoring services detect not only network and server issues, but also webpage object issues (such as slow loading

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, or third-party hosted page elements). Implementation of time performance monitoring for the

Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source cross-platform web server, released under the terms of Apache License, Apache License 2.0. It is developed and maintained by a community of developers under the ...

is the mod_arm4 module.

Types of monitoring

Users of website monitoring (typically network administrators, webmasters, web operations personnel) may monitor a single page of a website, but can also monitor a complete

business process A business process, business method, or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks performed by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (that serves a particular business g ...

(often referred to as multi-step transactions).

Servers monitoring from around the globe

Website monitoring services usually have a number of servers around the globe –

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and other locations. By having multiple servers in different geographic locations, a monitoring service can determine if a

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

is available across continents over the Internet. Some vendors claim that the more locations the better picture of your website availability while others say that three globally distributed stations are sufficient and more stations do not give more information.

Types

There are two main types of website monitoring *

Synthetic monitoring In software design, web design, and electronic product design, synthetic monitoring (also known as ''active monitoring or proactive monitoring'') is a monitoring technique that is done by using a simulation or scripted recordings of transactions ...

is also known as active monitoring, and *

Passive monitoring Passive monitoring is a technique used to capture traffic from a network by copying traffic, often from a span port or mirror port or via a network tap. It can be used in application performance management for performance trending and predictive ...

is also known as real monitoring.

Levels of Website Monitoring

There are different levels of website monitoring, the more complex your website, the more complex your monitoring needs: *Level 1 Uptime Monitoring – Availability of a Critical Page *Level 2 Transaction Monitoring – Availability of a Critical Process *Level 3 Performance Monitoring – Performance of a Critical Page *Level 4 Synthetic Monitoring – Performance of a Critical Process *Level 5 Customer Journey Monitoring – Level 1 to 4 plus Security Information

Notification options: alerts

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 Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

, IM, regular and cell phones, SMS, fax, pagers,

Skype Skype () was a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for IP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also had instant messaging, file transfer, ...

, RSS Feed, SNMP trap, URL notifications, etc.

Website monitoring services

The Website monitoring market is very competitive. There are 150+ active service providers and more than 100 are documented to have gone out of business. Most of the providers offer a free plan with low-frequency monitoring. In recent years

Synthetic Monitoring In software design, web design, and electronic product design, synthetic monitoring (also known as ''active monitoring or proactive monitoring'') is a monitoring technique that is done by using a simulation or scripted recordings of transactions ...

services have become widely available commercially, providing another vehicle to monitor the performance of specific web properties at a granular level.

References

# Amazon Downtime Cost $66,000
Forbes
# Dotcom-tools
Web page performance test
# Dotcom-monitoring Tool
DNS Monitoring
# Speed Affects Website Usage

{{WebManTools Website management Web server management software Website monitoring software