Website Monitoring - Why and How?

Network Management Services and Website Monitoring for Webmasters

What is Network Management?

Today’s companies rely on computer systems more than ever. For most enterprises it started with some personal computers, a server and a couple of other network devices like hubs, switches, routers and printers. For all these nice new fancy applications more servers were added and because you want to present your company on the Internet some of them are accessible from the outside.

Your IT-department should watch these servers constantly to make sure, that there is enough memory available, the disks are not full and all services you need are up and running.

This works quite well as long as you have enough tech guys for the number of servers you operate. Assuming that they have a lot of work to do to improve operations, it sometimes is difficult to check all servers as often as it would be needed.

If servers run unattended, without being checked by an administrator on a regular basis, sooner or later they will all fail.

This is, where network management systems come in. A network management system automates these checks and provides you an advance warning, in case anything goes wrong.

Typically a network management system checks if your servers are alive, which means that they respond on requests from their clients. For in-house systems they also check critical system parameters like disk-space, memory utilization and the server-load. They might receive alerts from the servers via SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to inform the administrator that some action needs to be taken.

In our view, all companies should have an automated monitoring to avoid downtime by just knowing in advance that something might be wrong and to minimize downtime by receiving an alert right away. As sooner your IT-staff knows about it, as sooner they will be able to fix it.

What is Website Monitoring?

Website Monitoring is pretty much the same as using a Network Management System. In our definition, the main difference is, that a website monitoring system checks from a customer perspective on the outside of your firewall using the internet, while Network Management Systems usually are located in-house.

The main advantage is, that your server is tested from the outside. Your customers won’t care, if your website is down, because your ISP changed something on his routers, your firewall department “improved” security or an administrator tried a new software on your web server. In many cases, these problems cannot be identified by an in-house system, or at least it would be much more difficult to do so.

The disadvantage might be, that if website monitoring is your only source of network management and security is tight on your systems you might not be able to monitor everything.

At www.nmsalert.com there are about 50 probes to check nearly everything on your servers. We call it website monitoring, because it is a service provided over the internet. But if you need an in-house system, you can also get it and you will be able to monitor your systems from the inside, double-checked from an independent 3rd party from outside the firewall as well.

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Most large companies have service level agreements in place. If an Internet Provider guarantees a 100% uptime without an network management or website monitoring system you will not be able to verify it. The reports and graphs of modern website monitoring solutions help you to verify your SLAs. This might save you a lot of money, if refunds are offered for bad service, but even better: it will help you to improve the quality of your services.

Alerts and Reports

Most Network Management Systems receive alerts from the devices they monitor and present problems in a map. Website Monitoring solutions mostly do active checks be accessing your system every couple of minutes and sending you an email or fax in case of trouble. Many services on the web just ping your server, which shows, that your server is alive and the connection to it is ok. You should go for a solution provider who offers a short interval of tests (every 5 or 10 but not more than 15 minutes), because you want to know, before your customers complain! Receiving an alert by email in case of a mail server-failure is not really a good idea. So when choosing a website monitoring service they should also offer alternate methods of letting you know.

If you look on a report you need to know the baseline for the results. It is not necessarily a problem, if a report indicates a 200ms instead of a 20ms response time for your server, because this depends on your location and the location of the test-system, but it is important that the latency is as small as possible and in case of a ping-test the packet-loss rate is minimal. Check the reports before subscribing to any website monitoring service. Colorful and easy to use front-ends will help you to use a self-service system, but being able to contact the company and getting help from real people is much more important!

About the company.

Taskforce iT-Consulting was founded 1989 in Germany and started their US business in 2002. We gained a lot of experience in large enterprise-scale networks by working as administrators, engineers, architects and consultants for companies all over the world. Most of our customers operate datacenters with 100+ servers on multiple locations and thousands of users. The network management division of Taskforce is offering website monitoring services at www.nmsalert.com.

About the Author.

Markus Linke is the founder of Taskforce iT-Consulting and was responsible for the planning, implementation and operations of our website monitoring project www.nmsalert.com. He is working as an iT-Consultant for more than 13 years and builds network management systems for his customers for more than 10 years. Many of the features implemented in the website monitoring service of www.nmsalert.com were requested by him from his experience in large networks.

markus@nmsalert.com
http://www.nmsalert.com