Web performance monitoring is a method that can help a business achieve more of its potential. It is commonly known to be the growing usage of the business critical apps. With high end tools, monitoring can be carried out effectively. The best website performance monitoring tools offer various features to address the requirement of the user.
Monitor your website in real-time to ensure that your visitors receive the best web experience possible. You will be able to quickly identify any performance troublespots with IT Scout’s vivid, graphical reports. With IT Scout you will have insight into what is happening behind the scenes of your website._
Uptime Robot [free + paid]
Pricing: $0/month. Professional plans start at $7/month
Uptime Robot has been viewed as the new kid on the block for a while and it’s probably one of the greatest best value for money solutions, especially if you are looking for just a simple tool that will tell you when your services are down. The free account gives you 50 monitors which are plenty enough for most small websites or web apps along with 5-minute monitoring intervals from 12 locations around the globe and 2 months of log storage
If you are looking for a tool that can provide you with both synthetic monitoring as well as real user monitoring, Uptime Robot is not going to be the one. As the name suggests it focuses on performing synthetic checks on your site and APIs every 5 minutes and provides alerts through a number of integrations with tools like Slack, Pagerduty, OpsGnie, Telegram, and VictorOps.
While it does lack certain features like speed insights, the 24 months of log storage and 1-minute checking intervals for the premium plan are a great bonus.
Features:
- Advanced notifications will let you set certain prerequisites for your alerts. Eg: x errors in y minutes
- Simple setup process
- Heartbeat monitoring for intranet and cron jobs
- SMS and email notifications are available
Sematext
Sematext differs from most other monitoring services because instead of a single product, they offer a comprehensive suite of services, including infrastructure and application performance monitoring and log management solutions.
Key Features:
- Monitoring all Core Web Vitals,
- API monitoring,
- SSL certificate expiration monitoring,
- Page speed monitoring,
- Email alerts.
Best Website Monitoring Tool for:
Sematext is good for everybody from small to large-sized companies that need reliable monitoring.
Price:
Cost: $2/HTTP monitor or $7/browser monitor (minimum $5/mo, includes 30 days of logs and configurable monitoring intervals)
Premium: starts at $29/mo (including 40 HTTP & 5 Browser monitors, 30 days of logs and configurable monitoring intervals)
All plans come with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Datadog Synthetic Monitoring (FREE TRIAL)
Datadog provides cloud-based infrastructure and application monitoring services. Its Synthetic Monitoring package specifically focuses on web monitoring and performance testing features. Datadog Synthetic Monitoring tests are run from servers around the world.
Key features:
- Performs uptime and response time monitoring from several locations around the world.
- Enables user-journey modeling to check for load errors, programming mistakes, and poor website design.
- Enables website tests to be compiled through browser recording.
- Uses AI methods to vary user journeys during test runs.
- Tests are run through actual browsers for real-life user experience modeling.
Datadog’s tests emulate user access rather than recording events during real user visits. This is a useful tool for checking important performance metrics on a new web page, such as response times, load error rates, and programming issues. Constant availability and latency tests highlight potential delivery problems such as load balancing or queuing problems. The tool will also log whenever the site becomes available. Uptime record-keeping is particularly important for those who need to prove compliance with SLAs.
The screens of the performance monitor include some great visualizations. An example is the waterfall root cause analysis view, which displays how one problem impacts many performance metrics. The service can pinpoint whether the performance deterioration is due to network issues, coding errors, or server problems.
Although the Datadog Synthetic Monitoring service performs its own check, you can design customized tests by recording walk-throughs. These simulations will then be implemented on the many Datadog testing servers to record the response-times of your webserver to those specific actions that you want to test. This is a great feature that will help you trial new features on a website to ensure that adding a button or a graphic won’t slow down the loading or navigation performance of that page.
The standard tests aren’t just repetitions of the same access runs. Datadog includes AI-based machine learning techniques that proactively seek out features in a page and attempt every combination of execution. Over time, tests establish what should be considered a typical performance of your site. This enables you to see a log of expected response times and it also adjusts alert thresholds so that you aren’t pestered by an overactive alerting system.
Pros:
- Allows for monitoring at different locations around the world
- Can monitor both internally and externally giving network admins a holistic view of network performance and accessibility
- Supports auto-discovery that builds network topology maps on the fly
- Changes made to the network are reflected in near real-time
- Allows businesses to scale their monitoring efforts reliably through flexible pricing options
Cons:
- Would like to see a longer trial period for testing
Datadog Synthetic Monitoring is a subscription service and you can access it on a 14-day free trial.
Fluxguard
Fluxguard provides next generation uptime and defacement monitoring. Engineered for the US military, Fluxguard’s multi-vector downtime protection alerts you to breaking changes to content, code, and design.
Features:
- Detects downtime with a full Chrome browser that loads all images, Javascript, CSS
- Monitors and alerts changes to HTML, text, APIs, network activity
- Multiple screenshot comparisons detect pixel-level changes
- Google Lighthouse audits look for performance issues
- Network change detection spots PII exfiltration
- Sequence multi-step, multi-page synthetic transactions to detect errors in registration, cart, login flow
- Machine Learning provides advanced defacement protection
SolarWinds Web Performance Software
Solarwinds Web Performance Monitor can find and fix internal as well as external site and app performance issues. It will perform complete performance monitoring and continuous synthetic transaction monitoring. It will give you detailed load-time metrics.
Further reading =>> Top tools for Synthetic Transaction Monitoring
Key Features:
- Web Performance Monitor provides an intuitive, browser-based transaction recorder that can record complex, multi-step transactions.
- It can monitor a lot of applications from multiple locations.
- It provides an intuitive dashboard so that you will be able to quickly see and troubleshoot issues.
- You can track sites and apps that are inside or outside your firewall.
- It will let you generate out-of-the-box and custom website performance reports for page load speeds, transaction health, website uptime, etc.
- It follows a simple pricing model i.e. based on the number of monitored transactions and locations. The price starts at $2055 and it offers a free trial.
Conclusion
Web monitoring helps identify specific problems occurring on your website, visitor behavior, the browser your visitors are using, and if there are any delays in your server. You can easily get complete reports on how your site is performing.