What Is Website Monitoring?

Given that we're a domain and website monitoring service, like many others, you've probably wondered, what exactly is website monitoring right?

Website monitoring, the term at least, has several interchangeable names that all mean the same thing, so I thought it would be useful to actually dive into website monitoring a little more in this article to explain what it is.

It sounds simple on the surface, but actually, monitoring a website has several challenges, and they might not be obvious at first...

In short, website monitoring is this...

A term used to describe the process of monitoring and testing the uptime of a website to ensure that the availability of a website or web application is working as expected for customers.

Simple right?

Our definition makes it sound simple for sure, but there's a bit more to it than that, let's dive a little deeper...

How Exactly Does Website Monitoring Work?

Website monitoring works when a series of computers all connected to one another perform the same task...

Check if your website is up.

And that's exactly what our service does, we check to make sure that your website is up, and is working.

Here's the process

1. We initiate a request to your website
2. Your website responds with a HTTP status code
3. If the status code is good, we'll mark it down as an uptime check in our system]
4. You'll be able to see the reports when you log in

And that's it, it's super simple to understand isn't it.

All we're really doing is performing a simple web request to your website to check whether it's up, if your site isn't up, we'll let you know.

The Different Definitions Of Website Monitoring

You might've heard us talk about website monitoring using some other terminology, and some of it means exactly the same thing, so be careful when identifying the different terms:

Here's a few of them:

• Website uptime monitoring
• Uptime monitoring
• Availability monitoring

These are terms that we use to describe the same thing.

Why?

Because that's how the web works, and how humans communicate with one another, you might refer to website uptime as availability, and vice versa, so it's good to be flexible with the different meanings and helps keep everyone on the same page.

Types of monitoring

There's several different types of monitoring that you can use on your website, and they're not all the same, here's a few of the different types:

• API monitoring - many websites use APIs to display data from a web application to you, the user
• Domain monitoring - unlike website monitoring, domain monitoring is the process of keeping a check on your domain's expiry date and the data linked to your domain name
• SSL monitoring - if your website has an SSL certificate, then being able to monitor your site's SSL will allow you to keep a track on when it's time for renewal

How Can I Monitor My Website Performance?

When it comes to monitoring website performance, you need to ask yourself...

What performance indicators am I looking for?

Why?

Because there are many, and choosing the right one will help you understand more about what type of monitoring tool is best for you.

Most monitoring tools will allow you to check your website's response time, and this is vital, because identifying whether your website is running slow for customers will help you identify the cause behind it.

Your site might be running slowly because of page speed, whereas if you knew about this first, you could've taken the necessary actions and implemented measures to prevent this.

Other kinds of indicators to look for are performance stats on your server's hardware, and without proper comprehensive statistics about your site's response time, you aren't going to know whether your server's hardware is to blame.

All of this data is data that a website uptime monitoring tool will be able to collect and curate for you, the end user.

Wrap up

If you liked this piece of content, feel free to give it a share, this was one of our shorter pieces of content, and we'd love to know whether you're preferring the longer content, or the shorter content

Let us know, and until the next post, I hope you have an amazing rest of your day!