When it comes to monitoring your website, files, hosting account, website speed… files and pretty much everything related to your digital presence, there are plenty of paid services you can use. You could also do all of this manually or maybe even hire someone to do this same job. However, I’ve always believed that free tools are the best bet for almost anything.
Wondering what free monitoring tools are available on the Internet? We all want to make sure that our websites are secure, reliable and run smoothly. And who better to do this for us than website monitoring software? Here’s a list of best free online website monitoring tools.
Nagios Core
Nagios® is the great-grand-daddy of monitoring tools, with only ping being more ubiquitous in some circles.
Nagios is popular due to its active development community and external plug-in support. You can create and use external plugins in the form of executable files or Perl® and shell scripts to monitor and collect metrics from every hardware and software used in a network. There are plugins that provide an easier and better GUI, address many limitations in the Core®, and support features, such as auto discovery, extended graphing, notification escalation, and more.
Cacti
Cacti® is another of the monitoring warhorses that has endured as a go-to for network monitoring needs. It allows you to collect data from almost any network element, including routing and switching systems as well as firewalls, and put that data into robust graphs. If you have a device, it’s possible that Cacti’s active community of developers has created a monitoring template for it.
Cacti supports SNMP polling, which itself covers a wide range of network devices. You can also extend Cacti’s capabilities to use scripts, queries, or commands for data collection, and save it as a template to use for polling other devices for similar datasets. Cacti leverages the power of RRDTool, an open-source data logging and graphing system for creating graphs from the stored datasets. RRDTool’s data consolidation lets you store collected data forever and is limited only by the size of your storage. Cacti also allows you to add multiple users and give them access with or without edit permissions, which is perfect for service providers and enterprises with a large NOC team.
StatusCake
StatusCake is a London-based company that’s been around since 2012 and boasts an impressive client list, including Microsoft, GoDaddy, and Netflix. While most other free tools only check on your websites from a single testing node, StatusCake has 48 testing locations spread across 28 countries around the world.
Key Features
- Performance monitoring: A full breakdown of the load times for all the pages on your website, tested from different locations.
- Uptime monitoring: Robust uptime monitoring that includes website checks in intervals as low as 30 seconds.
- Server monitoring: Monitors user-defined thresholds of RAM, CPU, and disk usage.
- Alerts: Configurable to receive via email, SMS, Twitter or through third-party integrations including Slack, Discord, Pushover, PushBullet, HipChat, and others. You’ll also get unbranded reporting, so you can set how you’d like these downtime notifications to be displayed to your social media followers.
Pricing
StatusCake offers a free version which includes basic uptime and speed testing, and will allow you to test up to ten websites. The two paid plans, Business ($24.49 per month) and Superior ($79.99 per month) allow you to test 100 or 300 websites, and also offer a wealth of additional features.
The paid plans come with a 7-day free trial – no credit card information required. When you sign up for a yearly subscription, you get a discounted price and two months free.
Pros
- The convenient, user-friendly dashboard provides detailed information on your tests
- The paid plans offer an impressive list of features
- Your sites are checked from multiple locations all over the world
Cons
- The free plan is quite limited, including only the basic features
- The support team isn’t always available to answer questions
Best for: Companies of any size that want to try out straightforward, feature-rich monitoring to see if it works for them. Agencies or marketing professionals will also find StatusCake to be a good choice.
Datadog
Datadog is a network monitoring solution that provides end-to-end visibility into on-premise and cloud networks. This tool offers network activity and traffic analysis, device and DNS performance and bandwidth monitoring, and server load balancing.
Datadog helps you capture and troubleshoot abnormal spikes in server traffic by tracking key network metrics such as TCP retransmits, latency, and connection churn. It also captures and analyzes network communication between servers, devices, and cloud regions.
This solution regularly analyzes system-wide DNS performance to check on overall health and any performance issues with the server. It also lets you measure overall bandwidth utilization and sends alerts in case of abnormal usage or network issues.
Datadog offers email, phone, and live chat support. There is a mobile app available for both iOS and Android devices.
New Relic One
New Relic One is a network performance monitoring tool built for application and network infrastructure maintenance. This software offers performance analysis, real-time network and SNMP monitoring, application management, and transaction diagnostics for network admins.
New Relic One can scan through an entire network system to find the root cause of server malfunctions. It also offers a network dashboard that provides greater visibility into internal switches, bandwidth usage, and network data.
You can also create custom visualizations of your network system to make it easier to understand each node and connection, as well as diagnose server issues more efficiently.
New Relic One offers email, phone, and live chat support. There is a mobile app available for both iOS and Android devices.
Zabbix
Admittedly complex to set up, Zabbix® comes with a simple and clean GUI that makes it easy to manage, once you get the hang of it. Zabbix supports agentless monitoring using technologies such as SNMP, ICMP, Telnet, SSH, etc., and agent-based monitoring for all Linux® distros, Windows® OS, and Solaris®. It supports a number of databases, including MySQL®, PostgreSQL™, SQLite, Oracle®, and IBM® DB2®. Zabbix’s VMware® monitoring capabilities allow you to customize using any scripting or programming language, which is widely regarded as its best feature.
Zabbix is probably the most widely used open-source network monitoring tool after Nagios.
Uptrends
Founded in 2007, Uptrends provides a variety of monitoring services, from standard website monitoring to real user monitoring. The company’s impressive client list includes big names like Microsoft, HP, Virgin, and Zendesk.
While the paid plans offer an extensive list of advanced features, you can find several free tools on the company’s website, including a free-forever website monitoring tool that will monitor your site from locations all over the world.
The free version will send you an email alert whenever there’s a problem – but not before your site has been tested from two different checkpoints, to prevent false alarms. You also get detailed data reports which you can export to PDF or Excel.
Key Features
- Multi-browser monitoring: Uptrends offers “real browser monitoring,” which hits your website with the three major browsers to recreate your users’ experience. The Full Page Check feature hits every webpage and element on your website, and it’s got 200 worldwide checkpoints for a true global performance monitoring.
- Private checkpoints: In addition to the company’s 200+ checkpoints around the world, you can also get your own private checkpoint which can run behind your firewall and monitor your business’ intranet and internal applications.
- Transaction recorder: Record and monitor all transactions on your website and get detailed information on shopping processes, website functions, and load times. Analyze your results with a series of powerful tools.
Pricing
Uptrends offers three Basic and two Advanced plans. The basic plans range from $14.59 per month for 10 monitors to $204.21 per month for 250 monitors. The two advanced plans offer premium services like multi-browser monitoring and transaction monitoring. They are priced at $34.94 for the business plan and $63.21 for the enterprise plan.
Real User Monitoring can be added to any plan for an additional fee, which varies according to the number of pageviews.
All plans come with a 30-day free trial – no credit card information required. You get 20% off the price when you sign up for an annual plan.
Pros
- The free version offers decent features you won’t find with most other free services
- The paid plans offer valuable features such as mobile web and real browser monitoring
- Over 200 checkpoints around the world – you can have your site tested from all locations, or just select the ones you need
Cons
- The free version is still quite limited
- Not the most user-friendly interface
Best for: Basically any type of user, from private users who want to monitor a single website for free, to large businesses who have the budget to invest in one of the feature-rich paid plans.
Conclusion:
Monitoring tools help you to get insights about your website, your network and your web applications. There are many different monitoring companies which you can use for monitoring your own website or company. All of these companies provide useful services free of cost.