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Website Performance Monitoring Choices

Website Monitoring has become a full-fledged industry, giving website owners a myriad of choices, from monitoring software, to subscription services to live monitoring. There are "inside jobs" and there are global agents. There are do-it-yourself systems and there are experts waiting to serve you. There are web hosting companies that monitor for their clients and there are free agents. What kind of website performance monitoring service do you want?

What should you look for in a website monitoring tool for your business?

What follows are ten things you should look for when choosing a website monitoring service. One size does not fit all, and your options vary as much as the variety of cars on the road. You will sleep a lot better at night knowing that you have the right monitoring service for your business needs.

Website Monitoring Features to Look For:


Website content monitoring versus a simple connectivity test

Many website monitoring companies and software options offer simple connectivity tests. They might test connections using a simple "ping" or by checking if your website's connection opens an HTTP port. In today's business environment, this is like choosing a new car by just kicking the tires. As web applications become more and more complex, you need to verify more then just connectivity. A good website monitoring service will read your server response, analyze the content for errors and check for timeouts.

Website Content Analysis

It's a dog-eat-dog world and in some industries a competitor could hi-jack your website's content. How would you like to discover that for the past week, half your leads were being redirected elsewhere? You can have your content monitored to make sure that changes have not been made without your knowledge and that your server is responding properly.

Dotcom-Monitor.com provides deep content analysis by reviewing each page for proper content and correct server response. In the case of an SSL site, Dotcom-Monitor checks for Certificate Authority, Certificate Canonical Name, Certificate Date, Certificate Revocation and Certificate Usage to make sure everything remains as it should.

"Full page" monitoring versus HTML monitoring

Many website monitoring services provide an option to "monitor your web site", but they really mean they will make a request to the web server, and they will monitor the server's response with your HTML file. But even the simplest website is composed of more than just HTML. Your HTML file will reference applets, images, forms, controls, scripts and more. The majority of so-called "website monitoring" services are really "HTML monitoring".

Dotcom-Monitor provides a full-page monitoring option, meaning that we will download and check every component of the page, providing you with complete information on user experience.

Business transaction monitoring

Seldom will you find static HTML pages anymore. Many websites are database driven, at least in part, and almost every site contains dynamic processes, such as shopping carts, account logins, sign-up processes, and etc. To check the complete "business process" one would have to go through series of steps, following along as a living human being would and making sure each page along the way is properly delivered by the web server. Very few website monitoring services and software can do this for you, which might just be the most important monitoring you need.

Dotcom-Monitor.com is able to monitor complex business transactions, and as it proceeds, it checks and records data for each page along the path a real customer would travel. We provide you summarized or sliced information on the whole transaction or each individual step.

Furthermore, recording transactions is a snap with Dotcom-Monitor Macro recorder. Using the Macro Recorder, you simply go through your website's transactions - shopping carts, online ordering system, banking transaction, etc... - just like a regular user. The Macro Recorder "records" each step of your transaction as you go through your website. It's like having a gopher running errands for you.

The Macro Recorder then uploads the steps in the transaction you want to monitor to the Dotcom-Monitor server for analysis.

Website Performance Monitoring

"Website performance monitoring" is often mistaken for website monitoring. In fact, performance is just one of the more common factors that many companies monitor. Uptime/downtime statistics are only part of the data that good external monitoring tool collects for you. Another important metric that should be collected is performance of the site, how long it takes the server to respond and deliver pages or process forms.

As Dotcom-Monitor.com monitors your website, we record performance data about each page and make that data available through real-time online reports.

Global website monitoring

It is important to monitor your site from multiple locations around the world. This gives you a better perspective on performance and availability of the site worldwide. By monitoring from multiple locations around the globe, you will be able to determine if a problem is localized to specific networks or it is something that affects all your customers. Also, you may use the data to choose or optimize networks on which your site hosted.

This is where all internal agents, most web hosts and software usually fall short. Dotcom-Monitor.com has six agents on three continents to verify that all your customers have access to a properly performing website.

Problem detection

The Internet is a large and ambiguous creature, spanning across multiple countries, networks and vendors. Short outages are common across the Internet. It is important for your website monitoring service to determine the difference between a real outage and short mishap somewhere on a network connection. You probably do not want to be notified at 3AM if a router in New Zealand went down for several seconds just at the time your website monitoring service happened to be checking.

Dotcom-Monitor uses a proprietary algorithm for detecting errors, comparing the results of your site to the results of other sites, of other locations and of other check runs within a short time interval. A summary analysis of all the information tells our agent if it is true or false alert. Based on the number of alerts for clients with a proper configuration, our rate of false alerts are under 0.02%.

Problem analysis

Once a problem has occurred and been reported, your website monitoring tool should provide more information than just the occurrence of the problem. It should provide as much additional information as possible to allow you to quickly and accurately find the cause and correct it.

On each problem, Dotcom-Monitor.com takes a snapshot of the page and also performs a network trace route. Those two pieces of information will pinpoint for you very close to if not the exact source of the network issue or server "misbehaving" problem.

Alerts and notifications

You should have the option of being notified about problems in multiple ways, not only by email. If your network goes down, sending an email will not do you a lick of good, unless your email server is located on a different network.

Dotcom-Monitor.com provides alerts by phone, pagers, SMS and even by wireless email. Your choice.

More than just website monitoring

Remember that e-business consists of more then just a web server. At minimum, there must be DNS (data name servers) and Mail Servers to function. Common businesses run FTP servers, firewalls, routers and much more. Your website monitoring service should be able to monitor all those functions, providing complete coverage to your e-business infrastructure so your business never goes down without your knowledge.


Claim Your Free Website Monitoring Service 30-Day Trial Now:

Dotcom-Monitor offers you all the website monitoring, reporting, notification, escalation and performance analysis tools your business needs to prosper in a single SIMPLE solution. You do NOT need special software or hardware. In just a few minutes you can open your account and be ready to have your website fully monitored. Click here to claim your free 30-day trial website monitoring test drive.


 
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