Anyone responsible for operating multiple websites or large-scale web-publishing enterprises, has to have asked themselves these questions:
- Are my sites up?
- Are they actually functioning correctly?
- Are we making any money?
- Where did I put the aspirins/Tylenol/emergency whiskey?
More importantly, other people in your organization are asking you (at least) the first three questions on a regular basis. Not being able to answer with authority leads to many a sleepless night, with occasional trips to the computer to poke at a few of the pages, to see if they are still there. This is no way to live.
There are several different types of automated website monitoring, system tracking, and alert systems available, and I'll be going through the pro and con of anything I find that looks either interesting or useful.
In addition, I'll touch on other topics related to this: SEO, statistics munging, and the Things that Make a Site Monitoring Service rock.
There is hope, then. Doing extremely repetitive, detail-oriented tasks thousands of times per hour is what computers excel at, and as mentioned, many people have come up with great services and pieces of software to do these things for you.
The problems will come when you have to set them up, make sure they are monitoring the correct things, and informing the right people if your systems are faltering ... and that is something that computers are NOT very good at. Furthermore, a computer-programmer-oriented approach to the actual configuration interface often results in almost as much stress as having unknown, flaky failures on your systems in the first place. Finally, the messages you get, and the information you see in your reports has to actually make sense ... few humans want to read enormous tables of numbers each day, and try to relate them to the ones they saw yesterday. The reporting interface has to show you the patterns that emerge out of the complex data that the monitoring software is generating, without overwhelming you.
A website definitely need traffic to survive else it is just an empty shopfront.
Posted by: Improved Search Engine Placement | March 30, 2008 at 01:58 PM