Tuesday, September 17, 2013

An Overview of Website Monitoring

Your website opens the door for your business to the business world on the Internet. Every aspect related to the website should be available and should be able to function for the end user. This is because it builds credibility and trust in the minds of your customers. Website monitoring is an effective tool that helps you know the performance of your website whether it is facing downtime or other issues related to it. We'll discuss here an overview of website monitoring.

What is website monitoring?
Website monitoring is a process to ensure that your website is working as you expected: in terms of its availability (24/7), performance and functionality. The aim of website monitoring is to minimize the website's downtime and to keep the server and online applications running.

Purpose of website monitoring
The main purpose of website monitoring is to know the end-users' experience on your online applications, websites and perform actions like checking an account balance, researching, reading, searching and online shopping. This helps you detect the problems early, resolve them quickly so that you can concentrate on other business activities. In other words, it saves your time, money and customers.

Types of website monitoring
Two main kinds of website monitoring are:
  • Synthetic website monitoring: It is also called active monitoring. It imitates the web browser. Here scripts are created to imitate the behavior of the end-user on your site. And these scripts are run at regular intervals to find the site's availability and performance.
  • Passive website monitoring: Also called real user monitoring, it records users' interaction with your website. This helps you to identify how your website is working – error free or experiencing any downtime/outage or which part of your business process is failing.
Functions of website monitoring
  • Global website monitoring: You can monitor your website from different locations across the globe. This helps you know the performance of your website from different servers and networks around the world.
  • Instant error notification: With the help of website monitoring services, you will get instant reports on the performance of your site like whether your site is facing down-times or any issues in accessibility.
  • Tracks the issues in web server and routers: By website monitoring, you can know track the issues in web server and routers along with the root causes.
  • Informs website defacement: It informs about the cause of your website defacement for example, hacking.
Advantages of web monitoring:
  • Website monitoring helps you know the website's up-time and downtime. By this, you can reduce the downtime of your website.
  • It is a good investment for your business. Because every minute of downtime equates to lost revenue.
  • When your website goes down, it gets instant notification via email, SMS or RSS.

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