Why you Need to Monitor your Website

A company website is a valuable point of presence for a consumer. It is an on going point of contact for product information such as sales, pricing, manuals, contact information, and more. The worst impression to make on a customer is to present them with a slow, unavailable or error prone website.

What Defines Availability?

A website can be unavailable on different levels, commonly the hardware level, the network level, and the application level.

At the hardware level, a server may be completely powered off or it may have hardware problems such as with a network interface card (NIC) which prevents it from responding to requests. The network level may cause problems for you website if a router or switch is down between your server and the internet or your server and the internal network. At the operating system level, services can fail, processes can lock up and stop responding.

We've mentioned failures that can cause problems for your website, but another issue can be responsiveness from your server. Are you aware of how long a web page takes to load for your customer? What about during peak times? Has a recent promotion increased your website traffic so much that it's bringing it to its knees?

How to Monitor your Website

Monitor Hardware and Network availability

Use ICMP ping to regularly test your web servers and critical points between your server(s) and the internet/intranet. Critical points include your routers and firewalls. Internally, you will also want to test the middle tier and back-end database servers. Use a Ping watch type in Cuevision Network Monitor to test these critical servers. Setup dependencies so that you are not alerted for every single failure behind a single point.

Monitor the Operating System and Web Server Software

Use a service watch type to monitor any critical services running on the server, such as the World Wide Web service, FTP service and the SMTP service. Use a custom watch type to monitor remaining disk space on the server and cpu utilization. Cuevision Network Monitor can execute and monitor your custom scripts, see the product help file for more information.

Monitor the Website

Start monitoring your website by setting up a web page watch type to point to your primary website point of entry such as the home page. Use this to get a base line on how your site performs. The Cuevision Network Monitor interface gives you the ability to see the load times of each page you are monitoring in a graphical timeline. Use this information to help you make an informed desicion about what acceptable thresholds are for your website.

The load time of a page is just one critical area, it is also critical to montior pages for content and/or error codes. For example, your page may be displaying 500 errors, in which case you would want an immediate alert. You should also use a web watch type to monitor the web page for words or phrases that is must contain. If your web page were to change because it was hacked for example, you could get alerted immediately.

You will want to define critical paths in your website to monitor. A critical path would be a set of web pages that a typical customer traverses through when they decide to carry out a certain function on your website, for example to do an online purchase. Critical path monitoring is most effective when they are setup in heirachical format using folder and nesting pages that depend on other pages. By using a heirachiacal method, you will not get inaundated by alarms should all the pages in a critical path go into an alarm state.

Conclusion

The Cuevision Network Monitor will provide you with peace of mind by allowing you to monitor your website and alerting you when there are problems. It's ease of installation and configuration will make you glad you bought it. Start monitoring your website now.