Internet
Typically, every website is tested thoroughly before it goes live for the public to make sure that it works fine without any disruptions. No matter the geographical location and network connection of the users, the website must provide continuous accessibility and stable performance for users. Yet, many times its uptime & performance will not be the same as it should. Several factors such as design, coding, network, servers, and even web traffic influence its working and affect user experience with the website. For any website, monitoring its uptime & performance is not easy because it requires tracking several site components and third-party services that the website is depending on. Unless a holistic check is made on networks, servers, custom website metrics, and others, it is less likely to draw conclusions on website downtime & performance issues.
Can website monitoring be a manual process?
Some website owners have their own methodologies for checking the website. Visiting the site will tell them whether it is working or not, but with manual methods, they cannot identify why the site is truly down. Also, it is less likely they can figure out how long the site is down for users. With a manual process, it is less practical to realize the issue the moment it happens because it is hard for humans to survey their website continuously for 24×7. Even if they inspect the site once a while, they can only check its availability at that time. Also, they cannot analyze performance issues at every point of their site functionality.
Are free tools helpful in website tracking?
As a site owner, when you rely on free tools for website monitoring, you should remember that you are compromising on many things that are critical to your online business. As these tools are typical of low quality with limited ability to test websites, you may not get a holistic report on all site parameters and third party services involved. Since most of these tools are function-specific, even to test a few parameters, you may need to deploy more than one free testing tool. The tools allow only basic features but if you want to assess the functionality of several key aspects of the website in one context, they may not support. There are also some free tools that can help understand the site response under different traffic loads, but the downside of using them is they cannot anticipate downtime and alert like automated monitoring systems. So if you are choosing a free tool for monitoring your website, remember they are good only for comparing and getting exposure to several services but not for real monitoring.
The convenience of working with an automated monitoring solution
When you are using an automated monitoring solution, you are having a business protection tool employed 24×7 for your website against downtime issues. Unlike a manual process, automated systems allow continuous monitoring of websites for uptime & performance and notify immediately when the site is down. It also evaluates the working and performance impact of external dependencies like hosting, CDN, and other third party services. Website issues may occur anywhere in the functionality, identifying of which is difficult even if you are technically sound. The good part of the automated system is, even a person with a non-technical background can track the data about their servers and networks that are associated with their sites. The service provides a detailed report on several site components and load & response metrics that allows site owners to easily detect and troubleshoot performance issues.