'Net Features : website monitoring

Monitor Your Websites 24 x 7 with New Mobile App

Michael Garrity — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Website and Web application-monitoring service provider Site24x7 is releasing a new app for Android devices that will allow users to connect with its services at any time from any where.

Whenever a user has a need to check critical website metrics on the go, including availability status, outage reports, service-level agreements (SLAs) and more, they are just a click away. Site24x7 is also offering Root Cause Analysis reports, which are gathered using a tool that combines traceroutes, ping, DNS analysis and screenshots of a Web page at the time of an error or outage.

Site owners can even opt-in to instant alerts via push notification that will let administrators and developers know immediately any time a website or server goes down. The app also features manage-configured monitors that let users easily track availability and the current status of their configured monitors.

The application is available for users with a Site24x7 account with devices running Android 2.2 or higher, and a mobile Web client is offered for non-Android users.

Website Monitoring, Five 9's & Embeddable Uptime Reports

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:49:00 GMT

There are about thirty services/resources I use with some regularity because of the value they provide. One of those services is website monitoring provider InternetSupervision.com (a WM advertiser). There are hundreds of website monitoring services available, and I'll list a few others below that I've tried and that I think work well. But InternetSupervision stands out in my opinion because of the type of alerts they send and their embeddable uptime reports feature. There's a free version available if you want to test it out - no invites required.

Much like other website monitoring services, InternetSupervision monitors website availability from multiple locations around the world. The manner in which they provide notification, however, is impressive - email, SMS and voice. You read that correctly, voice. A customer support person - regardless of what time of day it is - calls you on the phone to, in my experience very politely, tell you that your website is unavailable.

If you're like me, you are not always sitting in front of your computer, and when you are, you're not always checking email. The same goes for SMS. I don't always have my mobile phone with me. But the landline phone is always around and should something happen to one of my websites (like a serious failure), then one of the Internet Supervision operators calls me - nice touch. I hate to admit it, but it's actually happened quite a few times. Users set up a call list, and the operators call until they reach someone. This happened to me once on vacation. I had my office number set up first (but I wasn't working), my home number second (but I wasn't there either) and my mobile number last. They actually called on all three numbers until they reached me and told me the site that was acting up, and then sent a text notification to tell me that it was finally active again. What a relief.

The next reason I use InternetSupervision is because of the embeddable uptime reports (shown below). I can give users (prospective advertisers) an idea of the availability of the site. They understand that the site, as websites will do, occasionally goes down, but still achieves the elusive five 9's (%99.999 uptime). Good choices on hosting clearly help, but you have to wonder how low it would be without a reliable website monitoring company.

A few other very well respected web monitoring solutions include InternetSeer.com, Mon.itor.us, AlertSite.com and host-tracker.com.

Here's a sample of an embeddable uptime report from InternetSupervision.com:

Keynote and the Online Experience

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:02:00 GMT

Keynote Systems, a provider of on-demand mobile and Internet testing and measurement solutions, has made it possible to test and analyze the performance of sites and applications (from the cloud mind you) with single-click functionality from the KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) desktop software.

“We’ve done for cloud testing what Amazon did for online shopping,” said Vik Chaudhary, vice president of product management and corporate development at Keynote. “Now, with 1-click functionality, anyone can determine the performance of a website from around the world.”

Users will also be able to use Keynote’s cloud storage to store the 20 most recently executed performance test scripts for reporting and analysis. Other new KITE features enable users to build and share scripts and performance results with their colleagues and across teams via email, Facebook and iGoogle and across multiple file formats.

Download KITE for free at http://kite.keynote.com