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What Is Website Monitoring?
Comprehensive website monitoring used to be about complex management packages that required servers of their own running on premises. Fortunately, the cloud has changed all that. Today's website monitoring tools run as managed services, and provide intuitive new interfaces that give anyone a graphical, command center view of their website's critical metrics, including site traffic, load balancing and latency metrics, website health, and numerous other factors. Together, these determine how your online presence stands up to everything from e-commerce surges to large-scale web outages. Even more importantly than monitoring traffic to the front end of your site, these critical management applications can help you allocate resources and scale your web server capacity to save money while performing more efficiently.
Web servers run far more than websites these days. Data collection, marketing campaigns, media outlet, storefronts, and applications that span the gamut of business functions, all are common residents of your average web server. With these machines carrying these kinds of critical payloads, it behooves IT to make sure they know exactly what's going on with every web server in their domain—all the time and down to the last detail.
In today's web and mobile-first environment—in which an organization's success or failure often hinges on its consumer-facing apps and how they're consumed and perceived—in-depth management knowledge is of paramount importance. That job falls on website and app monitoring services. Think of them as Sauron's all-seeing eye, but devoted entirely to your web servers and directly related infrastructute. Some solely watch others combine their monitoring capabilities with some immediate management tools with which IT can perform quick fixes and other tasks. They all use the same string of buzzwords ('single pane of glass,' 'comprehensive visibility,' an outside-in view,' 'an inside-out view,' or 'a top-to-bottom view,' and so on) when monitoring your website's performance.
There's truth in all of those descriptions, but each of the website monitoring services reviewed for this roundup does the job differently. Plus, some are best suited for large enterprises (such as AppDynamics and New Relic Browser, our two Editors' Choice for enterprises) while others are best suited for for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) (such as SmartBear AlertSite Pro, our Editors' Choice for SMBs). These website monitoring services are useful not only for the IT staff managing website and apps within a business but for the tech-savvy executives (and not-so-tech-savvy executives) monitoring a website to gain specific business intelligence (BI). The best services—such as our three Editors' Choices—are the ones that don't make executives work too hard to find the information they need.
Getting the Fundamentals Right
Each website monitoring service reviewed has its strong points in terms of the features and functionality it offers but, to work for a modern business, there are a couple of core components each service must have in one form or another. Such components include browser monitoring, mobile monitoring, a combination of real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic performance monitoring; business-relevant reporting and analytics, and real-time alerting capabilities.
All 10 website monitoring services reviewed offer browser and app monitoring through a combination of different web-based dashboards. These dashboards range in customizability, level of detail, and graphical ingenuity—from simple lists and grid layouts to interactive maps, complex flowcharts, and mix-and-match tile dashboards. They're all designed to give businesses the information they need on a website's performance and user experience (UX), often using a traffic light-style, red/yellow/green color scheme.
When checking on whether or not your website is working the way it should in real time, it's easier at first glance to show a business user a big red or green number—or an actual smiley or frowny face (such as what Dynatrace UEM shows you) rather than inundating a business user with page response times, latency, error percentages, and a host of other metrics right away.
As the website monitoring services dig deeper into exactly which components of a website are working, how exactly they choose to present that data is key. Dynatrace UEM and SmartBear AlertSite Pro use tile-based, prebuilt, and custom dashboard layouts that are full of all manner of charts, graphs, and maps, pulling in the precise website analytics metrics a specific user within a business might need. That may be reports from synthetic bots testing the load time of specific user flows, RUM data breaking down the percentages of the different browsers and operating systems (OSes) on which users are running, or how specific transactions (such as the load time on an e-commerce page or abandoned shopping carts on a retail website) translate to a business's revenue.
For example, Pingdom uses one specific metric called uptime (i.e., HTML availability on a page) to quickly indicate website performance. Ghostery MCM is laser-focused on the wealth of third-party tags populating the front end of a website and conceptualizes them all in an innovative TrackerMap that visualizes the inner workings of a website. AppDynamics has both custom dashboards and an app flow map that is similar to Ghostery MCM's layout, but which shows the data flowing back and forth (between not only front-end website nodes and services but back-end databases and servers as well).
All of that monitoring and analytics data then has to get to the right people within an organization, and quickly enough for them to take action on errors, outages, or performance issues that could cost a business money. This is where comprehensive reports and detailed alert policies come in. Depending on the website monitoring service, this is done through a combination of email reports and notifications, text and phone alerts, and integrations that hook into other communication and collaboration platforms.
The best alerting capabilities among the products reviewed were from Pingdom and SmartBear AlertSite Pro, although AppDynamics wasn't far behind. With alerts, it's as much about accuracy and relevance as it's about the speed of real-time notifications. AppDynamics and Pingdom not only send quick, detailed alerts to the users within a business that need the information, but they offer deep root cause analysis to sift through a website's inner workings to identify whatever cog is acting up (be it a specific content request, error page, malformed piece of code, or overloaded server). SmartBear AlertSite Pro's multistep alerts for different performance thresholds were, overall, the fastest reviewed, containing the most accurate and relevant information.
Choosing a Monitoring Service That Fits
When it comes to the steep pricing and sheer scale offered by some website monitoring services, the product that makes the most sense for one business won't necessarily even fit another. That's why we named three Editors' Choices. AppDynamics offers the heftiest platform packing the most features but, at $3,300 per unit for each product making up the overall solution plus a lot of deeper application performance management (APM) functionality SMBs may not need, it's not as well-suited for a start-up or a SMB still in its early stages. For an international corporation or other large enterprise that needs to monitor dozens of apps and services, AppDynamics and New Relic Browser are our two Editors' Choices. Dynatrace UEM is also a fantastic (but expensive) website and app monitoring service that does everything an enterprise needs.
If your business is purely desktop-focused on what front-end components are taking up the most space and how your website's tags are impacting performance, it may be worth investing in the unique monitoring strategy offered by Ghostery MCM. SmartBear AlertSite Pro, our Editors' Choice for SMBs, and Pingdom are the website monitoring services with more delineated pricing tiers for businesses of various sizes. The plan you choose depends on the add-ons, integrations, and additional services your SMB may need—not to mention the service's overall ease of use, whether it's the business managers or developers and IT folks within the organizations who are primarily using the platform.
In totality, Editors' Choices AppDynamics and New Relic Browser stood above the rest for enterprise, as did SmartBear AlertSite Pro for SMBs. But website monitoring services are not one-size-fits-all, and all 10 products in this roundup can offer unique combinations of services that could be just the thing for your particular website.
As a living and breathing document, some of the tools listed today may not be listed in a year, as scores may change and new products may be added to the roundup. As you try solutions, be sure to check in with us to see if any new software has been added to this roundup.
Featured Website Monitoring Service Reviews:
LogicMonitor Review
MSRP: $375.00Pros: Agentless, comprehensive and secure systems monitoring service. Excellent online help and technical support options. Sophisticated alert, collaboration, and workflow management features. Customizable dashboards put monitoring and in-depth troubleshooting information at technician's fingertips. Comprehensive and customizable reporting.
Cons: High volume of information and multiple customization options make it rather complex. Steep learning curve for those not familiar with monitoring tools and services.
Bottom Line: LogicMonitor is a venerable management tool that still sports cutting edge tools, including collaboration, workflow, and excellent dashboarding capabilities. Its steep learning curve my keep it out of reach of small businesses, but for those serious about their web properties, LogicMonitor is an able solution.
Read ReviewAppDynamics Review
MSRP: $3300.00Pros: Depth of monitoring into Web applications and infrastructure is peerless. Complete suite of business-focused analytics, dashboards, reporting, and alerts for business users and IT professionals.
Cons: Expensive. Functionality is overkill for most small to midsize businesses (SMBs). When stacking up product units, can get pricey for enterprises as well.
Bottom Line: AppDynamics is a fully realized website monitoring service for businesses, and a leader in both the website monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM) spaces. It's our Editors' Choice for enterprises.
Read ReviewNew Relic Browser Review
MSRP: $199.00Pros: Easily combines data from all aspects of your infrastructure to provide synthetic and real performance monitoring. Entirely customizable. Able to deep dive into almost any aspect of your data, no matter how far removed from the main alert or problem area.
Cons: You'll have to buy into the entire New Relic application performance and network monitoring ecosystem to take advantage of all the data points from the server to the application to the end-user.
Bottom Line: New Relic Browser provides a rich ecosystem of performance and monitoring data for your web sites and applications. It's a bit much for smaller businesses, but for medium to large organizations or anyone with a business-critical web presence, it's a boon.
Read ReviewSmartBear AlertSite Review
MSRP: $99.00Pros: Intuitively designed user interface (UI). Customizable reporting capabilities. Reasonable pricing. Quick, informative alerts. Strong internal monitoring with PrivateNode.
Cons: Some limitations in root cause analysis and real user monitoring (RUM), compensated for via smart integrations with other platforms.
Bottom Line: Website monitoring service SmartBear AlertSite has great real-time alerting capabilities, strong monitoring and reports across platforms, and its highly configurable both in its user interface and its pricing for SMBs and enterprises.
Read ReviewDynatrace UEM Review
MSRP: $10000.00Pros: Top-notch dashboard usability, user experience (UX) metrics, mobile monitoring breakdowns, and business transaction monitoring. Best interactive interfaces and visual reports for return on investment (ROI) tracking.
Cons: Additional vertical offerings for application performance management (APM), standalone synthetic monitoring, and data center RUM not included. Alerting setup only available in rich client. Starting enterprise plan is a bit pricey.
Bottom Line: Dynatrace UEM is a surprisingly intuitive and well designed website monitoring tool with excellent reporting and dashboards. While it could use some additional capabilities around APM, synthetic monitoring, and some other advanced features, it's still an excellent choice for medium to large-sized operators.
Read ReviewRiverbed SteelCentral AppInternals Review
MSRP: $2000.00Pros: Rich feature-set. Vast troves of analytics. Gorgeous, easy-to-use interface. Track the user experience across every stage of the journey.
Cons: Not meant to be a standalone website monitoring tool. Very expensive if all you need is a URL monitoring tool. No iOS or Android apps. Can't customize your dashboard. Won't perform synthetic monitoring.
Bottom Line: Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals is nicely designed for beginners and small businesses, while still offering an excellent feature set with thorough analytics.
Read ReviewSolarWinds Web Performance Monitor Review
MSRP: $1995.00Pros: Important information and alerts are pre-configured. Synthetic monitoring gives you the chance to catch issues before they arise. Combined with the SolarWinds Orion suite, you can use this tool to monitor every performance aspect of your IT infrastructure.
Cons: No built-in real user monitoring. Competitive monitoring can only be configured through Orion. Outdated interface.
Bottom Line: SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor is focused on synthetic monitoring and sports excellent features and analytics in that direction, though they're wrapped in a slightly outdated interface. But if user monitoring or real-time analytcs are your thing, you'll need to keep looking.
Read ReviewPingdom Review
MSRP: $13.95Pros: Fast and comprehensive alerting and reporting. Useful combination of synthetic and real user monitoring (RUM) monitoring. Detailed and thorough root cause analysis for website uptime and performance incidents.
Cons: Pricing quotas on core features can get expensive. Code and number-heavy functionality is less friendly for business users. Not a lot of emphasis on mobile website traffic.
Bottom Line: For IT professionals and serious website operators, Pingdom has it all - strong monitoring, excellent analytics, and advanced features, too. The only downside is that all this goodness is wrapped in a difficult interface that requires a steep learning curve to leverage.
Read ReviewGhostery MCM Review
MSRP: $5000.00Pros: Tag-tracking approach is genuinely innovative. Competitive benchmarking provides strong business relevance. TrackerMap is a great measure of website latency and privacy.
Cons: No mobile monitoring or deeper website infrastructure visibility beyond frontend. No text alerts. Switch to tag-focused monitoring represents a significant shift for enterprises.
Bottom Line: Ghostery MCM is highly focused on front-end monitoring through third-party tag tracking. This is both innovative and valuable, but as it lacks many other core website monitoring capabilities it'll be more of an addition to your IT tool kit rather than a foundation.
Read ReviewGeckoboard Review
MSRP: $49.00Pros: Easy-to-configure dashboard. Pulls in multiple third-party apps for one comprehensive data overview. Gorgeous design.
Cons: Not meant to be a standalone website monitoring tool. Doesn't offer notifications of any kind. Customer service is suitable only at the highest price tier.
Bottom Line: Geckoboard is well-designed for small businesses or newbies to website management. But its focus on disseminating rather than surfacing data means it's not meant to act as a standalone website management tool.
Read Review
anyone knows of a simple monitoring tool which can periodically send a request to a web service and alert me when it doesn't get a response?nothing fancy, just scheduling and reporting.
Meidan AlonMeidan Alonclosed as off-topic by Flexo♦Jul 29 '13 at 15:48
This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:
- 'Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.' – Flexo
7 Answers
I'm using http://pingdom.com/ to good effect. It can not only check to see if a website is up or down, but can also be set to check for specific text (eg 'sql error', would be a fail). It's got plenty more features, and very nice reports, as well as regular emails for day-to-day status.
Alister BulmanAlister Bulman
The most common program in this area is Nagios. It has a scheduler which performs test at intervals you set, it has alarms when something goes wrong and it has plugins which perform the actual test. If there is no plugin for your service (a zillion of plugins already exist), you can write one without touching the main code.
I personally use mon instead because it is much simpler and writing monitors (the small script that do the actual test) is very simple. It does everything you expect from a monitoring tool such as setting intervals for the alarm (no need to tell me every minute that the Web site is down).
bortzmeyerbortzmeyerJMeter can do it as daemon process, the if you are using unix like platform cron helps you a lot
Steel PlumeSteel PlumeI personally use Content Site Monitor (http://www.contentsitemonitor.com). It has a really simple and cool web interface that allows you to view your site’s up-time statistics on a desktop or mobile screen. It’s easy to configure your monitoring parameters as well. It doesn't just ping your server to make sure that it's alive. It allows you to specify certain content/keywords that you want to monitor and it will send you alert email if the content/keywords are missing from your site. Best of all, it’s free to monitor up to 3 sites!
Big Brother works well. We use it in our office to monitor a dozen very busy production servers.
A Web Service can be monitored like a Web Page, with tools such as curl or twill.
curl is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS and FILE. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos...), ...
Uptime Robot Slack
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twill is a simple language that allows users to browse the Web from a command-line interface. With twill, you can navigate through Web sites that use forms, cookies, and most standard Web features.
Repeating the probe can be done with cron on Linux and Task Scheduler on Windows.
Website Up Monitor Service Center
I've used Alertra in the past. It was pretty good. They access your site from multiple locations around the world. It's a subscription service, so nothing to install. Just pay monthly. No contract, IIRC.