Our website performance monitoring tools will allow you to monitor the uptime and downtime of your website along with giving you a list of webpages that perform the quickest. This will allow you to notice if there are any issues with your website, or it may even help you notice when search engines crawl your site more often, which ultimately will increase your rankings in Google’s search engine results pages.
This free website monitoring tool will show you how well your website is doing. Use this helpful tool to keep track of your websites performance.
Sematext [free + paid]
Pricing: $0/month. Premium plans start at $19/mo.
Sematext Cloud is an all-in-one log management and monitoring solution that provides end to end visibility and observability. When it comes to website monitoring, the suite offers a real user monitoring (RUM) solution, Sematext Experience, and a synthetic monitoring tool, Synthetics.
With the launch of Sematext Experience and Synthetics, Sematext became the go-to tool for developers looking to get insight into their infrastructure while still keeping an eye out on the user experience metrics.
With Sematext Experience, you’ll get a report on the actual experience and satisfaction of your users while providing key pieces of information as to how your website or application is performing in different locations, devices, or different connection speeds.
On the other side of the spectrum, you’ll be able to set up Synthetic Monitoring to create a complex system of monitors for all your resources in just a few clicks. The monitors will ping your resources from a number of locations all across the globe and report back stats like website speed, website uptime, error rates, third APIs responses, SSL certificate expiry, and many other mission-critical metrics. You can even use it to benchmark against competitors and identify areas you should optimize to improve website performance.
Getting started with Sematext is quite easy and intuitive thanks to the simple setup wizard that every new user gets to see.
Every plan has a risk-free, 14-day trial that does not require any credit card to be added. We also offer granular control over what you pay for as every product is individually priced. This way you can pay only for the products and features he needs.
Features:
- A unified location for all your logs, metrics, and events
- Identify resources & requests with the biggest negative impact on your website performance
- Real-time alerts and debugging solutions
- Support for all major frameworks
- Very well documented features
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
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.
Conclusion
Monitoring your website’s availability and performance is a very important part of making sure it is accessible for your customers. It can also mean the difference between a customer staying a customer, or moving to a competitor. Keeping an eye on your site stats allows you to spot trouble before it happens, so you can get ahead of problems, catch unexpected issues or even plan upgrades.