Web Monitoring Info

Commercial and Hosted Web Monitoring Systems

All of these sites seem to be doing business as of December, 2004. They are all commercially-driven in one way or another, which makes sense given that they actually have to use their own bandwidth and servers to provide the information we all want from a monitoring package.   Hopefully we'll have a chance to try most or all of them out, and get some feedback on what works, and what doesn't.

            http://www.dotcom-monitor.com

• Accessibility check: Is the site reachable.

• Performance check:  Does the site respond within a user-specified amount of time.

• Content check:  Is the appropriate content visible on the page.

• They also check cookies, site certificates, and myriad protocols (POP3, SMTP, DNS, etc) to make sure those services are up.

• Alerts by email, pager, or automated 'voice call' system.

• Their pricing is by the number of 'tasks' monitored, starting at 79.00 per month.  http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/pricing.asp#packages

http://alertsite.com/

• Checks from multiple locations spread around the globe.

• Break down performance by DNS time, redirect time, time to first byte, etc.

• http://alertsite.com/web_site_monitoring.shtml

• Pricing starts at 9.95/page/month for checks every 60 minutes (+19.95 one-time setup fee).

• 34.95/page/month for 10 minute checks.  All from three different cities.

• Notification by voice call or SMS for additional fees.

• Good description of who would use the service. :)

http://ipwatcher.com/

• Hosted, $9.95/url for 60 minute checks, $24.95/url for 15 minute checks.

• Discounted 35% for 10 or more services.

• $19.95 one time setup fee, 10 day free trial.

http://www.internetseer.com/

• They have 24/7 staff that attempts to get your site back up, contacts your hosting provider, etc.

• Can add different notification lists for various types of problems, so particular people are called when various things are down.

• They charge 99.95 per year for the basic service, or 29.95 if you get the 'small business discount' (for which you have to fill out a form. Also, you can get it for free if you agree to take periodic surveys, receive emails, etc.

http://www.webmetrics.com/

• SiteMonitor service from $10/month per URL to $250 for content checks and benchmark comparisons to other sites.

• Checked from 20 servers around the world.

• They offer many other services, including web analytics to see how things are converting, etc.

http://www.checkupdown.com/

• Extremely basic service, just checking up or down, with rudimentary interface.

• Starts at $75/year for 1 URL monitored once every 60 minutes. Prices go up with frequency of check, as do many of the other services listed above.

http://www.hisoftware.com/

• Interesting service that checks sub-pages (presumably by spidering through all of them) to make sure they comply with privacy, content, or other guidelines. A service to check for profanity, inappropriate content, etc, would be interesting.

http://www.websitepulse.com/

• Interesting pricing model, very configurable.  Starting at $1/server, up to $29 additional for minute-by-minute checks.

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Site_Management/Monitoring/

• List of website monitoring sites in DMOZ.

http://alertra.com

• ICQ, AIM, etc. as alert methods.

• Alerts that escalate according to a particular schedule (notifying different people as they escalate).

• Ability to suspend checks during system maintenance times.

• Charge per device and monitoring time. $1/month per device for checks every 60 minutes, up to $60/month per device for checks every 1 minute.

• Interesting-looking interface, highly graphical.

         http://mercury.com/
         http://www.ipmonitor.com/
         http://siteimprove.com/

http://www.business.com/directory/internet_and_online/site_management/monitoring/

• List of website monitoring sites in business.com.

Monitor or Suffer Mightily

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.