Web monitoring is one of the aspects of web development that I enjoyed most, when I was in my prime. And I would like to share with you all some free and paid tools that can help keep track of your site in the best way possible.
Websites nowadays are part of many business processes and therefore, they require continuous monitoring to ensure the site’s availability and to safeguard it from attacks and other problems including crashes and outages.
AppDynamics Review – The Best Software Monitoring Service for Web Apps
Web applications have complex and diverse interactive elements that are not always easy to monitor. While some website monitoring services watch apps, you really need a service that caters primarily to this market.
AppDynamics is an application performance management solution. It supports everyday application environments, including Java, Node.js, C/C++ (Beta), and PHP. Additionally, AppDynamics covers more complex platforms and solutions, including WebMethods, TIBCO, JMS, and queuing technologies.
The service does real-time transaction monitoring across crucial metrics, including response time, slow rate, error rate, load, and stalls. It also eliminates blind spots in your applications by automatically mapping the relationships between the various tiers and services.
AppDynamics automatically detects anomalies and provides rapid root-cause diagnostics. The tool also captures important debug data to speed up the software debugging process. They also offer an in-depth diagnosis, allowing you to identify the problem down to the offending line of code.
Additional features include:
- End-user monitoring
- Application performance monitoring
- Infrastructure monitoring
- Network monitoring
- Business performance monitoring
AppDynamics has three pricing plans, and you have to contact the provider to get the actual price. The Pro plan also supports complex multi-cloud topologies mapping and visualizing, creating alerting policies and health rules, and key performance metrics.
The Advanced and Peak plans offer additional capabilities depending on what you need. This service is ideal for industries like retail, media and entertainment, healthcare, and insurance.
You can check out the free trial or schedule a demo before you decide if App Dynamics is right for you.
Site24x7 Review – The Best for Multiple Websites And Apps
Monitoring a single website is hard enough, but Site24x7 makes it easy to keep an eye on up to 500 websites at once. This service is all-inclusive and will monitor the website, cloud, server, application, and network.
Site24x7 has a single log that collects, consolidates, analyzes, and stores data where you can easily view and troubleshoot problems. They use synthetic and real user monitoring in each package, so you always get the best of both worlds.
The Starter plan costs $9 per month and monitors up to 10 websites and servers from more than 110 monitoring locations globally. All plans support HTTP(S), DNS, SSL/TSL, FTP, REST APIs, URLs, SMTP server, SOAP web service, and more.
You can also manually select the monitoring location from multiple addresses across North America, South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
Site24x7 supports Ruby, Java, PHP, .NET, Node.js, and mobile platforms for apps. The tool also monitors Windows, Linux, Docker, VMware, FreeBSD, GCP, and Azure for servers.
Additional features include:
- Mobile access
- Root cause analysis
- Hosted status pages
- SLA management
- Alerts and reports
- Support for managed service providers
Site 24×7 plans and pricing is as follows:
- Starter: $9 per month
- Pro: $35 per month
- Classic: $89 per month
- Enterprise: $225 per month
If you’re looking for an adaptable and flexible service for multiple websites and applications, Site24x7 is a great option.
Monitive — Best for Swift Downtime Notifications
A lot of teams have people who keep an eye on the health of their websites but may not be the IT folks to solve any problems. Monitive is an uptime monitoring program that is great for anyone quarterbacking their squad like this, who needs to know any issues as soon as they arise.
It’s a relatively simple system. Sign up for Monitive and add your websites into its online dashboard. The program will check for downtime at regular intervals. If it finds your site isn’t available to visitors, Monitive will persistently let you know with:
- An email alert as soon as the outage is discovered
- If no action and taken and the site is still down after three minutes, you’ll get a text message alert
- If the site remains down after ten minutes, you get a phone call
This ensures you’re never unaware of downtime when it happens. Whether you have a web store, a customer support page, or any other site that you need up and running 24/7, Monitive’s proactive notifications help you or your team get working on a fix ASAP.
And it’s not just about keeping important sites available to customers or visitors at any time. Nipping downtime in the bud keeps your Google ranking from falling—so, even your blog or content marketing pages can benefit from the ever-watchful Monitive platform.
It doesn’t just end at downtime monitoring, either. Monitive contains additional useful features like:
- Custom timeout length monitoring
- Ping monitoring
- Team member access (multiple users)
- Set maintenance timeframes
- Slack, PagerDuty, Telegram, and Pushover notifications
Monitive starts with a free forever plan, which allows you to monitor one web page with health checks every ten minutes. Your logs are stored for one year and you get both weekly and monthly summaries of your site’s uptime. However, you only get email alerts—no texts or phone calls.
Need a bit more? Get five monitors that check on one-minute intervals with Monitive’s Pro plan. That unlocks text, phone, and app alerts, multi-user accounts, keyword checking, and much more.
Pricing scales depending on the number of monitors you need. It starts at five for $7 per month for five monitors. Pay monthly or annually, and cancel whenever you like.
Monthly pricing goes up for every additional five monitors, up to 200. For example, you can get 50 monitors for $42 per month or $420 for a year.
If you want clean, simple, and reliable uptime monitoring software that will help you respond to issues with speed and agility, get started with Monitive today.
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.
Conclusion:
When you choose to host your website on a managed web hosting account, you are given some very basic website monitoring tools. These are usually limited to telling you how many visits, page views, resources being consumed, etc. But for this reason I have found myself ditching our old account and switching to another web host who provides more detailed website monitoring tools.