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Website Monitoring

By David Sanders, WebsiteDevelopingTricks.com

Website monitoring is the process to track how users are interacting with Web Application or Website. Website monitoring basically ensures the accessibility or availability of a website by the users. Apart from these features Website Monitoring also ensures useful operations like online shopping, online registration process, form submission process, e-banking processes and updating the web content for the viewers and other researchers.

Consistency and reliability matters and reducing the downtime is considered as a challenge to network engineers to turn a website from simple to popular.

In a broad sense website monitoring is divided in two categories – Synthetic Monitoring and Passive Monitoring. While ‘Synthetic Monitoring’ is commonly known as ‘Active Monitoring’, ‘Passive Monitoring’ on the other hand is called as ‘Real Monitoring’. Both these website monitoring have their own advantages.

From synthetic monitoring to passive monitoring

Synthetic monitoring is very effective for the Administrators to understand whether a website is running slow, i.e., experiencing downtime before it affect the end user or general viewers. In other word, it can be said that Synthetic Monitoring is done using web browser emulation. Network administrators deploy an entity that simulates users and run transaction on a regular basis.

There are several drawbacks in synthetic monitoring. End users face problems and for network administrator it is difficult to understand ongoing problems. Though execution of scripts ensure transaction works within the environment but, for a network administrator it is difficult to create all types of environments and scenarios for end users. This process requires time as well as resources.

To overcome this problem network administrators are taking help of passive or real monitoring. Real monitoring is very helpful in troubleshooting any problems. Passive monitoring relies on actual inbound, so the problem can be discovered after they occurs.

Features of Website Monitoring

• Accessibility Check: Website accessibility monitoring checks whether the website is available for the users from any location in the world.
• Performance Check: This actually checks how much time a website takes to response from the server for a client request. Normally it should take 5 seconds to load a webpage in the client web browser. If noticed that the response from server takes more than 5 seconds then it will be considered as a performance issue and it should be checked.
• Content Check: Content checking is very useful for websites, which have database transaction. This is actually for the users who have administrative privilege and controlling power on the web site. Those users generally add some data or end users on the site. Content monitoring ensures that content could not be altered without their concern and all the entered data are valid.
• Form Submission: This check ensures that the data input is valid and submitted properly, i.e. the http post request.
• Cookie Support: Cookies are the small piece of information sent from the server to the client browser. Cookies are stored and can be retrieved from the client browser. Website monitoring also checks that the client can get the complete cookie support.
• Server Digital Certificate: This feature is useful if any company uses SSL certificate. Digital certificate monitoring checks the authority, name, date and usage of the SSL certificate.
• Client Digital Certificate: Some applications require client side certificate for authentication. Install the certificate on the client side is also a part of website monitoring.

For E-cards or Greetings Card Site and Online Shopping Site, net administrators use two types of websites monitoring, i.e. synthetic monitoring to passive monitoring, in a little different way.

First, the average number of visitors visiting the site should be checked. This is necessary, because the number of visitors interacting with these websites is very high and therefore, requires special monitoring. With high traffic, low performance or crash of server may cause due to high traffic. So for any such discrepancies analysis are done for the websites.

Secondly, these websites comes with some special areas or pages, where maximum hits are done by the viewers. Analysis is done with special care for all types of action, which are performed on these areas of the websites.

Finally, the administrators should maintain regular updates of products and their placements on the websites.