What to Look For in Website Monitoring

Website monitoring has become an industry in itself. It use to be website owners had to hope that their ISP was reliable and provided uptime service and was trustworthy. Now this has changed. Website owners now have choices as to protect what they spent a lot of money on – their website. There are many types of monitoring available including services, do-it-yourself systems, and software you can download. Depending on your needs will depend on what type of service you want. Below are some things to look for when you are looking for website monitoring services:

 

·        Website content monitoring: When looking for website monitoring, you need to be sure the company does more than just do a “ping” to the site. The monitoring service will need to read your server response, analyze it for errors and timeouts.

·        Website analysis: The website monitoring service should provide content analysis of your website. This will ensure no content was changed on your site without your consent. The website monitoring service will check for Certificate Authority, Certificate Canonical Name, Certificate Date, Certificate Revocation, and Certificate Usage to make sure everything is working as required.

·        Full page monitoring: Some website monitoring tools will only scan and monitor your HTML code. This is not proper. You have to make sure the website monitoring company you choose provides a full page monitoring service. This is necessary because there is more involved than just HTML. Your site has graphics, applets, forms, controls, scripts, and a whole lot more. Any of these things could go wrong. So monitoring has to include these elements to.

·        Business transaction monitoring: Most websites use dynamic pages these days not static pages. This is because many websites are driven by databases. On these sites you will find shopping carts, account logins, sign-up processes, and more. A good website monitoring service will be able to go through and check each step or stage of your eCommerce website to make sure all parts of it is working correctly. This means it will look at all complex systems, the database, and anything else that is part of the system.

·        Performance monitoring: If you have a good website monitoring service, you know your website is being monitored for performance. This is also an important ingredient in website monitoring. It is always good to know how long it takes for the server to respond to links, or whatever the user clicks on a given page.

·        Problem detection: One aspect to website monitoring is problem detection. A good monitoring service will be able to detect whether the problem your site experiences is in fact the server’s problem, or a problem at another part of the network that is affecting the link to your server. You need to be aware of problems no matter what causes them and who creates them.