What is the end goal of website monitoring? If you are not an admin or someone that will be managing the services then it is hard to tell. Website monitoring helps you to stay on top of your site’s availability, performance and security. If you are inside the business you will need to determine what these are to begin with, or find out if your users do. You will want to make sure that your internal teams are able to keep an eye on their sites without having too much effort, which means finding internal website monitoring tools.
In this blog, we’re going to discuss what website monitoring tools are and what they can do for you. Website monitoring tools, also known as web hosting performance analysis, will help you immensely in server or site downtime situations. There are various types of tools that you can use to monitor your website or server activities. These tools will track down API calls, DNS lookup, uptime statistics and how long it takes your server to respond to requests.
Pingdom — Best Page Speed & Performance Monitoring
Pingdom is well-known for some of its free tools like the website speed test and real-time outage map. But they also offer excellent paid website monitoring services.
Some of the top benefits of Pingdom’s website performance monitoring include:
- Uptime monitoring
- Real user monitoring (RUM)
- Synthetic interaction testing
- Page speed monitoring
- Root cause analysis
I recommend Pingdom because its API integration allows you to easily automate your interactions. It’s also a top option for teams. You can set up your notifications so that the right team member is always alerted. This will drastically improve your incident workflow process.
Pingdom goes one step further by not only alerting you of a problem but also identifying the root cause. As a result, you’ll be able to fix it faster to get back up and running with minimal downtime.
There are three different pricing tiers offered by Pingdom. These are the discounted rates for an annual contract:
- Standard — $42.12 per month
- Advanced — $82.45 per month
- Professional — $228.25 per month
Pricing is based on resources. Depending on the plan you select, you’ll get either 50, 80, or 250 uptime and endpoint monitors, respectively.
Advanced monitors range from 3 to 25, RUM ranges from 500,000 to 5 million page views, and user logins range from one to ten.
Unlike some of the other website monitoring services that we’ve seen so far, Pingdom’s plans aren’t as customizable. So you’ll have to pick the one that best fits your needs.
With that said, Pingdom does have enterprise-level customization.
For those of you who want more advanced monitoring options, you can add-on server monitoring for as low as $9 per month.
TeamViewer — Best for Customized Monitoring Plans & Ecommerce Sites
TeamViewer is used for monitoring more than 300,000 websites across nearly 200 different countries.
Major companies like Visa, BMW, and Avis rely on them for monitoring—so you’ll be in good company if you go with them.
Its cloud-based platform is one of the best ways to monitor the uptime of your website. Since everything is run via the cloud, you won’t have to install any software or hardware to take advantage of this tool.
Uptime rates are monitored down to the minute and your history is archived for two years. It uses more than 30 check locations to monitor your site’s uptime from major markets across the globe.
TeamViewer runs tests using multiple protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, PING, and DNS to ensure accuracy. It also does VoIP checks, public IP checks, and email checks.
You’ll have access to daily, weekly, and monthly reports as well as instant alerts for any failures. The service comes with synthetic transaction monitoring and full page load monitoring as well.
The synthetic transaction service is ideal for any ecommerce website. It simulates a user’s interaction with your checkout process to ensure that all steps are always working properly.
TeamViewer also includes features for RUM (real user monitoring) and server monitoring.
Pricing for these services starts at just $10.90 per month. You’ll get a 20% discount if you commit to an annual plan.
I like TeamViewer because the pricing is fully customizable. So you only pay for what you actually need. They offer Basic and Advanced tiers that will work for many websites, as well as a custom plan that lets you get the exact services your require.
For those of you who are running a simple website like a blog, you probably won’t need synthetic transaction monitors, so you wouldn’t be paying as much.
Overall, this is one of the best website monitoring tools on the market today. At the very least, I’d recommend taking advantage of the 15-day free trial to check it out.
Monitis Review – The for Custom Monitoring Plans
If you believe that you should only pay for what you use, Monitis is the website monitoring service for you. Some of Monitis’s clients include SIEMENS and the University of Cambridge.
With Monitis, you choose only the features you want, and then the service will create a customized price and plan to suit your needs. This is the perfect arrangement for users who know exactly what they want from a website monitoring service, down to the specific features.
The service checks your website every 60 seconds from more than 30 server locations in North and South America, Europe, Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa.
This is also an all-inclusive monitoring tool. You can monitor websites, servers, networks, and applications. For website monitoring, Monitis checks uptime, full page load, and transactions. The service supports Windows and Linux for server monitoring and will check CPU, network, memory, and bandwidth, among other aspects.
Monitis also has a powerful API to customize your experience further. You also get SDKs for all popular languages, including Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, and C #.
Additional features include:
- Real user monitoring
- Graph view
- Device monitoring
- Asset tracking
- Backup
- Patching
- Comprehensive reporting
- Webpage content check
- Instant alerts
- Screen capturing
- Diagnostic
- Funnel visualization
Montis has a good selection of alerts integrations, including Slack, VictorOps, OpsGenie, Jira, and PagerDuty, among others.
You can try out the 15-day trial before making a final decision.
Cula.io
Best if you want a free service
REASONS TO BUY
+Free tier+Very simple to use
REASONS TO AVOID
-No SMS or voice call alerts
Cula.io offers an attractive free plan that allows for the monitoring of a number of parameters. You will be alerted by email, over Slack, Discord and Pushover if there are any server issues.
Upgrading to different tiers gets you more URLs, more parameters, custom agent-less application performance monitoring, longer history storage and more content checks per URL.
There’s a nifty little demo version that doesn’t require you to create an account. The dashboard of the service is very easy to use and the Cula team deliberately kept things simple. There’s no native mobile app, transaction monitoring, advance reporting capabilities or maintenance scheduling, but you wouldn’t need those anyway if you’re after a basic website monitoring service on a budget.
UptimeRobot
Cheap if you only want to monitor uptime
REASONS TO BUY
+Superb value for money+Up to 20,000 monitors!
REASONS TO AVOID
-SMS/voice quota doesn’t renew every month-Limited functionality
UptimeRobot is a bit of a veteran having been launched at the beginning of this decade. It was one of the first to offer a free service which is still running and offers HTTPS, ping, and port monitoring, all with 5 minute checks.
Upgrade to the Pro Plan to get the monitoring interval reduced to 60-seconds with a range of extra options and improved limits, such as extended logs, SSL monitoring, advanced notifications, maintenance scheduling and custom HTTP headers and statuses.
However, if you want more advanced features, you will need to look elsewhere. UptimeRobot provides basic performance monitoring (limited to response time) and the main monitoring locations are US-based primarily.
Conclusion:
Website monitoring is not just for big companies. A website monitoring tool might be just what you need if your webmaster is unreliable or if in order to scale up your business you need to be aware of your site’s status at all times. Website monitoring software will alert you when a server is down or if your website’s main pages cannot be accessed, and if the problem is not fixed, the site monitoring system sends you an email notification and/or SMS message. It can also monitor how many visitors surf your web pages and use the search engine, and it will send you an alert if the number of visitors or page views goes below or above a predefined limit.