Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website A website is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address in an Internet Protocol-based network. A web site is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network or web application In software engineering, a web application is an application that is accessed via a web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is hosted in a browser-controlled environment [citation needed] or coded in a browser-supported language (such as JavaScript, combined with a. Website monitoring is often used by businesses to ensure that their sites are live and responding.
Website Security monitoring is also used to verify that a domain (and web site) is not only responding properly, but has not been hacked, blacklisted or hijacked[1].
Multiple tools are available to automate site availability checks and security checks.
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What for?
Monitoring is essential to ensure that a website is available to users and downtime The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable. Downtime or outage duration refers to a period of time that a system fails to provide or perform its primary function. Reliability, Availability, Recovery, and Unavailability are related concepts. The expected Unavailability is the percentage of a timespan that a system is is minimized. Users that rely on a website or an application for work or pleasure will get frustrated or even stop using the application if it is not reliably available. Monitoring can cover many things that an application needs to function, like network connectivity, Domain Name System records, database connectivity, bandwidth, and computer resources like free RAM, CPU load, disk space, events, etc. Commonly measured metrics are response time and availability 1. The degree to which a system, subsystem, or equipment is operable and in a committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at an unknown, i.e., a random, time. Simply put, availability is the proportion of time a system is in a functioning condition (or uptime Uptime is a measure of the time a computer system has been "up" and running. It came into use to describe the opposite of downtime, times when a system was not operational. The uptime and reliability of computer and communications facilities is sometimes measured in nines . "Five nines" means 99.999% availability, which), but consistency and reliability metrics are gaining popularity.
Inside or outside monitoring
Website monitoring can be done from both inside and outside of a corporate firewall A firewall is a part of a computer system or network that is designed to block unauthorized access while permitting authorized communications. It is a device or set of devices configured to permit, deny, encrypt, decrypt, or proxy all computer traffic between different security domains based upon a set of rules and other criteria. Traditional Network Management Network management refers to the activities, methods, procedures, and tools that pertain to the operation, administration, maintenance, and provisioning of networked systems solutions focus on inside the firewall monitoring, whereas external performance monitoring will test and monitor performance issues across the Internet backbone The Internet backbone refers to the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected networks and core routers in the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity network centers, the Internet exchange points and Network access points, that interchange Internet traffic between and in some cases all the way to the end-user Economics and commerce define an end-user as the person who uses a product. The end-user or consumer may differ from the person who purchases the product. For instance, a zookeeper, the customer, might purchase elephant food for an end-user: the elephant.
Inside firewall monitoring is done by special hardware appliances which can help you determine if your internal applications’ sluggish performance is caused by: design of applications, internal infrastructure, internal applications or connections to any public internet. [2]
External performance monitoring is also known as end-user monitoring or end-to-end performance monitoring.citation needed
Real user monitoring Real user monitoring is a passive web monitoring technology that records all user interaction with a website. Monitoring actual user interaction with a website is important to website operators to determine if users are being served quickly, error free and if not which part of a business process is failing. Software as a Service (SaaS) and measures the performance and availability experienced by actual users, diagnoses individual incidents, and tracks the impact of a change.
What impact?
| If it's up... | A.K.A... | It's down... per year |
|---|---|---|
| 90% | n/a | 876 hours |
| 95% | n/a | 438 hours |
| 99% | two 9's | 87 hours, 36 minutes |
| 99.9% | three 9's | 8 hours, 45 minutes, 36 seconds |
| 99.99% | four 9's | 52 minutes, 33.6 seconds |
| 99.999% | five 9's | 5 minutes, 15.36 seconds |
| 99.9999% | six 9's | 31.68 seconds |
Various types of protocol
Website monitoring service can check HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. Its use for retrieving inter-linked resources, called hypertext documents, led to the establishment of the World Wide Web in 1990 by English physicist Tim Berners-Lee. There are two major versions, HTTP/1.0 that uses a pages, HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with the SSL/TLS protocol to provide encryption and secure identification of the server. HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems. HTTPS should not be confused, FTP File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to exchange and manipulate files over a TCP/IP based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server applications. Applications were originally interactive command-line tools with a, SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks. SMTP was first defined in RFC 821 (STD 15), and last updated by RFC 5321 (2008) which includes the extended SMTP (ESMTP) additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today. SMTP is specified for outgoing mail, POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by local e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. POP and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) are the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval. Virtually all modern e-mail clients and, IMAP The Internet Message Access Protocol is one of the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval, the other being the Post Office Protocol (POP). Virtually all modern e-mail clients and mail servers support both protocols as a means of transferring e-mail messages from a server, such as those used by Gmail, to a client, such, DNS The Domain Name System is a hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participants. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical (binary) identifiers, SSH Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a secure channel between two networked devices. Used primarily on Linux and Unix based systems to access shell accounts, SSH was designed as a replacement for Telnet and other insecure remote shells, which send information, notably passwords, in plaintext, leaving, Telnet Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive communications facility. Typically, telnet provides access to a command-line interface on a remote host via a virtual terminal connection which consists of an 8-bit byte oriented data connection over the Transmission Control Protocol (, SSL Transport Layer Security and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide security for communications over networks such as the Internet. TLS and SSL encrypt the segments of network connections at the Transport Layer end-to-end, TCP The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite (the other being Internet Protocol, or IP), so the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. Whereas IP handles lower-level transmissions from computer to computer as a message makes its way, PING Ping is a computer network administration utility used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an Internet Protocol network and to measure the round-trip time for packets sent from the local host to a destination computer, including the local host's own interfaces, Domain Name Expiry, SSL Certificate Expiry and a range of other ports with great variety of check intervals from every 4 hours to every one minute. Typically, most website monitoring services test your server anywhere between once-per hour to once-per-minute.
Advanced services offer in-browser web transaction monitoring based on browser addons such as Selenium Selenium is a chemical element with the atomic number 34, represented by the chemical symbol Se, an atomic mass of 78.96. It is a nonmetal, chemically related to sulfur and tellurium, and rarely occurs in its elemental state in nature or iMacros iMacros is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox web browsers and Internet Explorer which adds record and replay functionality similar to that found in web testing and form filler software. The macros can be combined and controlled via Javascript. Demo macros and Javascript code examples are included with the software. The extension was developed. These services test a website by remote controlling a large number of web browsers, thus they can also detect websites issues such a Javascript bugs that are browser specific.
Time performances: for example an HTTP page should answer in less than 1 second (for a download of 16Ko) to be considered as "good".citation needed
Various type of monitoring
You may monitor a single page of your website, but you can also monitor a complete business process (often referred to as multi-step transactions).
Servers around the globe
Website monitoring services usually have a number of servers around the globe - USA, Europe, Asia, Australia and other locations. By having multiple servers in different geographic locations, monitoring service can determine if a Web server is available across different Networks worldwide. Some vendors claim that the more locations the better picture on your website availability while others say that three globally distributed stations are sufficient and more stations do not give more information.
Types of website monitoring
There are two main types of website monitoring
- Synthetic monitoring Synthetic monitoring is website monitoring that is done using a web browser emulation or scripted real web browsers. Behavioral scripts (or paths) are created to simulate an action or path that a customer or end-user would take on a site. Those paths are then continuously monitored at specified intervals for availability and response time measures also known as active monitoring, and
- Passive monitoring Passive monitoring is a technique used to capture traffic from a network by generating a copy of that traffic, often from a span port or mirror port or via a network tap. Once the data has been extracted, it can be used in many ways also known as real monitoring.
Notification options - alerts
As the information brought by website monitoring services is in most cases urgent and may be of crucial importance, various notification methods, often known as "alerts" are used: e-mail Electronic mail, most commonly abbreviated email and e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages. E-mail systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which e-mail computer server systems accept, forward, deliver and store messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the e-mail infrastructure, typically an e-mail server,, IM, regular and cell phones, SMS Short Message Service is a communication service component of the GSM mobile communication system, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between mobile phone devices. SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application in the world, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile, fax, pagers, Skype Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice calls over the Internet. Calls to other users of the service and, in some countries, to free-of-charge numbers, are free, while calls to other landlines and mobile phones can be made for a fee. Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing, etc.
See also
- Synthetic monitoring Synthetic monitoring is website monitoring that is done using a web browser emulation or scripted real web browsers. Behavioral scripts (or paths) are created to simulate an action or path that a customer or end-user would take on a site. Those paths are then continuously monitored at specified intervals for availability and response time measures
- Real user monitoring Real user monitoring is a passive web monitoring technology that records all user interaction with a website. Monitoring actual user interaction with a website is important to website operators to determine if users are being served quickly, error free and if not which part of a business process is failing. Software as a Service (SaaS) and
- Internet Server Monitoring Internet server monitoring is much wider than website monitoring. Monitoring a web server means that the server owner always knows if one or all of his services go down. Web server monitoring may be internal, i.e. web server software checks its status and notifies the owner if some services go down, and external, i.e. some web server monitoring
- Web analytics Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage
- Website tracking Website tracking refers to the act of archiving existing websites and tracking changes to the website over time. There are many applications to website tracking which can be applied to many different business. The different applications are listed in depth below:
- Application Performance Management Application Performance Management, or APM, refers to the discipline within systems management that focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and service availability of software applications
- Network Management Network management refers to the activities, methods, procedures, and tools that pertain to the operation, administration, maintenance, and provisioning of networked systems
- Traceroute traceroute is a computer network tool used to determine the route taken by packets across an IP network. An IPv6 variant, traceroute6, is also widely available
- Network monitoring The term network monitoring describes the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator in case of outages via email, pager or other alarms. It is a subset of the functions involved in network management
References
Categories: Web technology | Network management Categories: Computer networking | Information technology management | System administration
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With website monitoring from PAS Software you are made aware of exactly how your website
Arun
ue, 22 Dec 2009 10:18:44 GM
As you must have known by now, Twitter was recently hacked and defaced by a group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army.
Q. I turn on my computer and it stays on but as soon as I go to a website sometimes the monitor will go black. What causes this? How can I fix it? How else can I turn on the computer since I can't shut down the right way? Help!!!
Asked by Dean G - Sun Dec 28 21:58:25 2008 - - 1 Answers - 0 Comments
