Uptime.com Blog

A Review of Website Monitoring Tools

While there are many factors that can affect your website’s speed, uptime and overall performance, there are also a variety of tools available to monitor your site and detect any issues. Here are four types of monitoring tools that can play a major role in ensuring that your website runs smoothly:

Ping Monitor

This type of monitoring works by sending pings to your website at specified intervals to ensure that the site is up and running.  Ping monitoring is able to sense connection outages, track website speed, and report statistics. If a ping detects a connectivity issue between your website and network hosts, you will be notified.

HTTP Monitor

This application allows a person to capture and view all of the HTTP traffic between a computer and the internet. The HTTP Monitor enables a developer to see incoming and outgoing information in order to modify request and response data before it hits the browser.

DNS Monitor

A Domain Name Server Monitor, or DNS Monitor, tests to ensure that your URL is resolving correctly by the Name Server to the expected IPs. Performed at preset time intervals, this application can provide detailed information regarding network outages, server connection failures, permission errors, protocol failures and more.

TCP Monitor

Transmission Control Protocol, also referred to as TCP, is a standard that establishes and maintains a network conversation between an application program and the Internet Protocol (IP). TCP utilizes a retransmission strategy to ensure that no data is lost during conversations between network devices. Although TCP is intended to remain error-free, a TCP Monitor is an effective way to inform the user if a TCP port fails to receive or respond to a message.

Website monitoring services, such as Uptime.com, will utilize these tools to monitor your website and inform you immediately of any issues. In addition to Ping, HTTP, DNS and TCP monitoring, Uptime also provides Real-User, SSH, SMTP, POP and IMAP monitoring, among others.

Michael Esposito