Website Monitoring - Types

Today, having a website has become a common need for every business – regardless of size small, medium or large. Websites help businesses access customers worldwide. Customers can similarly access businesses at any time and from any place. All this is because of good maintenance of the website for twenty four hours a day and seven days in a week or round the clock. To provide the service to worldwide customers the companies server or website is always up. When the site is going down the company has to face consequences of revenue loss and reputation loss.

Website monitoring services help businesses to know the up time and down time of their websites with many advanced monitoring methodology and techniques. These send alerts on performance of the website via different modes of communications to the owner. There are website monitoring service providers today. Some of them are free and some are paid. There are different types in website monitoring services. In this article, we will deal with different types of website monitoring.

• Internal monitoring: Internal monitoring is also known as inside monitoring. There are several causes for a website being down. In the internal monitoring method, the performance of a website measure from inside the firewall. This method is the traditional network management technique. Generally the problems are caused because of flaws in applications of the website, network connection failure from server to the internet etc. It can be solved with some special hardware appliances.

• External monitoring: Also called 'outside end user performance monitoring' and 'outside monitoring', external monitoring is done outside the firewall. In external monitoring of your website, good Internet connectivity is essential.

These two types are the main categories of website monitoring. Even though there are another two types of monitoring techniques available. Now we will see them.

• Active monitoring: Active monitoring is also called synthetic monitoring. In this method, the monitoring is done by using a web browser or scripted real web browsers. These scripts will keep on work continuously or upto a certain time intervals. The scripts will analyze and maintain the record of performance and responses measured. It will useful to correct the problems before the end user facing it.

• Passive monitoring: Passive monitoring is also called as real user monitoring. A copy of the traffic to the website is taken to monitor. Passive monitoring technique relies on the actual inbound web traffic.

Passive monitoring is helpful to discover the exact performance problem in the website. But in active monitoring, issues are identified on the predefined paths only.

Based on the requirement to the business website and the available budget, the owners select the suitable type for monitoring their website.