What Is Website Monitoring?

Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a Website or Web application from different locations through the day. Website monitoring is used to ensure that sites are live and responding to viewers, to generate trends that show performance over time, and highlight a range of factors that could affect the functionality of a Website. Website monitoring services also help you benchmark your Website against the performance of your competitors to help you determine how well your site is performing.

What Does Website Monitoring Involve?

To ensure that your site is up and performing at peak performance at all times, Website monitoring services provide special servers called monitoring agents, located all over the world. These Website monitoring agents check your website at a set frequency and perform test transactions of your Website based on a predetermined script. Website monitoring agents warn you when they detect that your Website is inaccessible or performing poorly. If one or more monitoring agents report downtime, an alert message is sent to your Web operations team.

Advantages of Website Monitoring

A Website that is frequently inaccessible is likely to destroy customer loyalty and lose business. Ensuring that all of the elements of a Website are functioning properly is critical to maximizing your company's Web investment. A good Website monitoring service offers several advantages:

• 24x7 monitoring of all key areas of Website and Web applications
• Quick and accurate notification of problem when it occurs notification
• Web-based real-time reporting of historical data
• Easy setup and immediate results, with no software or hardware to maintain
• Multiple Internet location monitoring for a holistic view of end-to-end connectivity for geographically distributed users
• An accurate view from the end-user perspective

Features of a Good Website Monitoring Service

Advanced Website monitoring services are capable of carrying out multistep Website transactions. They also offer several capabilities through a Website monitoring dashboard to set up tasks in Website monitoring accounts. Website monitoring features include,

• Complete monitoring and reporting for uptime and performance using user defined Web transactions
• Real browser-based Website monitoring for the most accurate read on performance
• Robust alerting mechanisms to deliver trouble notifications to multiple points
• Complete monitoring to ensure that there are no faults within pages, including examination of referenced objects, SSL certificates, and page content
• User-friendly transactional monitoring, with the ability to capture each business process
• Geographically dispersed monitoring locations so that Websites and Web applications using different Internet backbones can be accessed
• Root-cause analysis of problems when they occur

For maximum control over your Website, Website monitoring must be transparent and the measurements it provides must be accurate. Keynote's efficient Website monitoring tools provide total visibility into the performance and functionality of your Website from an end user's perspective.