Almost every website owner or webmaster uses one or more monitoring utilities or services to monitor the uptime of their website for various reasons. Most common of these reasons to monitor a website are as follows:

• Pro-actively take care of a potential downtime situation.
• Prepare a website’s uptime report for the company.
• Check to see if the hosting company is meeting the already defined uptime SLAs.
• If the hosting company doesn’t meet uptime SLA, claim a refund as per the initial agreement.

There could be many more reasons due to which a webmaster is required to monitor their websites but then the real question is if the way a website is monitored reflects uptime in its true sense. Before you think harder, let us know what uptime really means, in a layman’s perspective.

Website uptime is the total time duration for which all the required functionalities of a website are available.

Now, if you want to monitor a website to check if it is online or not, the most simplest way to determine this would be by checking the HTTP status codes that the website will return upon requesting its URL. But what if the site uses a database to pull its content and the database itself is down but the site still returns HTTP status code 200? [HTTP status code 200 = OK]

If that happens, every website monitoring service that monitors such a website based on the HTTP status code it returns, will always report it to be up and available no matter even if a visitor can’t see anything on the site. This happened recently with one of my blog wherein the database was hung but the homepage was somehow returning a http status code 200.

I immediately opened an urgent ticket with my hosting company and the blog was back up, really up, in 30 mins.

I highly recommend that you check your website monitoring service and also find out how they determine the availability of your website. If your site earns you hundreds or thousands of dollars every month and ranks high for your targeted keywords, you don’t want to take chances with your website monitoring. Do you?

Important features of Nagios

Nagios has many powerful and useful features, some of the important ones are listed below.

• It can monitor services such as SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.
• Monitoring of host resources such as processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.
• Support for implementing redundant and distributed monitoring servers.
• Scheduled downtime for suppressing host and service notifications during planned maintenance.
• Ability to acknowledge problems via the web interface.
• Web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.

Other than the features listed above, Nagios comes with an easy to understand plugin design that you can use and develop your own monitoring plugins. Another great feature that many other monitoring programs do not offer is the ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable. What this means is that if a router that has several servers behind it goes offline, Nagios will be able to tell you that the router is down and the servers are not reachable. Other monitoring systems may show all the devices to be down.

Nagios being an open source program can not only save you thousands of dollars that you could have otherwise invested in commercial monitoring softwares but also offer you with enterprise grade monitoring that is reliable and robust in it’s performance. You should give it a try and check it out before you invest in commercial softwares.

» [Nagios Website], [Documentation], [Nagios Snapshots], [FAQs], [Download Nagios]

• SiteUptime – It’s one of the most reliable and easy to setup website monitoring service. I use it to monitor my other blog – BlogHash and found it be accurate and their email notification service is great! Their free plan monitors one website of your choice with 30/60 minutes monitoring interval and notifies via email. The link to my public report is here.
• WebSitePulse – Offers “triple stage” monitoring, Performance website monitoring simulating repeat user and full-page website monitoring, simulating first-time user experience and they have 16 monitoring stations across the world. Failure notifications can be received using SMS, phone, email, Instant messenger and other medias. If you are looking for a very advanced monitoring service, this is the one you should look for. The basic plans starts at $3 for a single monitor.
• AlertSite – It’s another advanced monitoring service that can not only monitor your website performance but also monitor the server resources such as CPU load, disk utilization and processes. Their transaction monitoring service is really good and has a lot of reputation in the market.
• WatchMouse – Another good website monitoring service that monitors the uptime of your website, services on various ports and provides notification upon failures. They also offer details reporting and statistics concerning your website. Their plans offer monitoring for 1 to 30 servers at 5 minutes interval.
• DOT-COM monitor – Like other companies, they too offer website monitoring, network monitoring, transaction monitoring and also load testing for your website from 10 monitoring stations. They also offer port monitoring for various services and notifications service via phone, cell and email.
• WEBMETRICS – Features hosted monitoring services such as load testing, intranet monitoring, website performance monitoring and also offer professional services to deliver customized monitoring solutions.
• Alertra – Well known website monitoring service offering features similar to others but also offers a security vulnerability scanner. They have a do not disturb feature which when activated will not notify the contacts during a certain period of time and one can also suspend monitoring during scheduled maintenance window to avoid receiving false alarms.
• HYPERSPIN – It’s one of the most widely used website monitoring services. Their features are Multi-Protocol Support, 10 monitoring locations to monitor your websites and applications, false alarm elimination, send automatic emails to your hosting provider to have your server rebooted, Maintenance Scheduling and Transaction Monitoring.

Believe it or not! Proactive monitoring can save your business from disasters by giving you an opportunity to pro actively fix the problems before they cause further damage. What are you waiting for, start monitoring your website today!

Do you use any other monitoring service that you want to share with our readers? Please post them in comments and we will add them to the list on this page.