Why Website Monitoring is So Important

December 14, 2011

The Internet is a large place to upload photos, videos, text files, and other information. Whenever you have an important investment online, such as finances, or have a website to maintain, you run the risk of having an intruder damaging the server or an external source causing the server to go down. In order to lessen the risks you need to have a special type of tracking software to keep track of what is going on with your servers on the Internet backbone. With a special tool called web site monitoring.

Explanation of Website Monitoring

Website monitoring can be defined as examining and confirming consumers are able to access your services online. If you have website monitoring, you can monitor the whole interactions of the website or monitor one page at a time. If your website has an encryption key, a shopping cart, a login or password combination, tracking cookies, website monitoring is a fantastic pick in observing the interactions of your users. Many features and services are included with website monitoring such as server events, examining bandwidth, a network’s connection, disk space, Domain Name System (DNS) records, connectivity with databases, available resources on the computer, such as free Real Access Memory (RAM), and the Central Processing Unit (CPU). Monitoring your connection to the Internet is important to check and see if your services are online. If they are not, you can receive notification through e-mail, text message, or Short Message Service (SMS) that your server is experiencing downtime. If your server is experiencing downtime, you can switch your down server to an active server and put the down server offline. Website monitoring allows you to examine the situation reasonably before it gets way out of hand.

Synthetic Monitoring versus Passive Monitoring

Two types of website monitoring exist: synthetic monitoring and passive monitoring. Synthetic monitoring, also called active monitoring, is website monitoring via web browser or web site browsers using scripts. Synthetic monitoring is important because a webmaster can see if his website is experiencing any problems, if the server is slow or having downtime prior to reaching the consumers. The service is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Passive monitoring is data taken from traffic from a period. The data is often taken from a specific port, such as a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) port. Data is removed and analyzed by website administrators to see the activity of the servers at the specific time.

The difference between passive monitoring and synthetic monitoring is that synthetic monitoring is good for checking for the server’s uptime. Passive monitoring is good for troubleshooting any problems with the server, such as an intruder trying to attack the server. A good webmaster and network administrator knows how to use both synthetic monitoring and passive monitoring to monitor for network problems.

Website monitoring is an important tool to use in looking at the interaction of your users as well as evaluating the uptime of your servers. Servers can not be up 100% of the time. Thus, they need an aid to keep them running in excellent shape.

Previous post:

Next post: