What Is Uptime Monitoring, and Why Is it Important?
Uptime monitoring is how you make sure your website is always accessible to visitors and potential customers.
It not only notifies you when your website is down but also provides analytics so you can identify spots in your availability. Perhaps a certain server is impacting your uptime in one region, or your site is having trouble handling heavy traffic. These tools define “uptime” as a percentage of your site’s availability. Your website is “up” and accessible 99% of the time if it has a 99% uptime rate.
Your users cannot wait for your site to resume operation if you are offering a complete B2B platform, such as free online signing or customer relationship management. Websites that offer API infrastructure market themselves on having uptime rates above 99.99% because the services that are developed on them must always work. Although a 97% uptime might seem realistic, that translates to 11 days per year when you cannot provide customer service.
How to Set Up Uptime Monitoring for Your Site
Uptime monitoring services send requests to your site from external servers worldwide to check uptime. This ensures that your site is accessible from anywhere in the world and that it is not unacceptably slow for users in certain parts of the world.
Those requests will be met by one of several responses, each with an HTTP status code. You will recognize “404 – Page not found”, but these automated requests are looking for either 200, which means the request was successful, or 500, which means it isn’t.
Uptime monitoring tools will also look for “time to first byte,” the time it takes to start receiving any data from your site. This measures how fast your site loads for users in that region. Additionally, these tools can alert you to breaking points on specific pages and notify you of any changes in performance on certain pages.
Uptime monitoring tools also test your site’s Transmission Control Protocol, which creates connections between different servers worldwide and figures out how to send your data around in the most efficient way possible. Other technical factors like DNS lookups—the time it takes for the user’s browser to find your site after they put in the address—and confirmation of your site’s SSL certificate are also tested.
Online monitoring services use servers to continuously and round-the-clock assess websites, servers, and apps. The monitoring service makes sure that the website or app is up and running smoothly. It will notify you via email, IM, or text message if it finds any connectivity or performance issues.
Uptime monitoring tools
Many uptime monitoring programs are available online, and different tools for different needs can range from free tools to packages that cost thousands of dollars a year. While some do straightforward HTTP tests to determine whether your website is running, others carry out exceptionally complicated tasks on the server back-end to track more than 50 checkpoints. Whatever your situation is, there is bound to be a tool that suits your needs. Uptime Verify is a good one to start.
Before launching your website on the live internet, you should think about uptime. Unit testing and effective data management are examples of standard procedures for quality control in testing that can help you avoid future headaches and after-hours maintenance work.
Ping monitor
A ping monitor “pings” your website to ensure it’s up and operating. They detect a lost connection and alert you if your website is down. This tool is simple, cheap, and effective, but this monitoring method doesn’t give you information on internet connection speeds and downtime data in addition to that alert.
The connection speed is an essential factor: many users will leave a site if it doesn’t load within a few seconds, and that drop in engagement plus slow speeds will hurt your Google search rankings.
HTTP monitor
When moving data around the internet, we use HTTP and predefined rules that specify which data should be sent to web servers and browsers. HTTP monitors give you information on the HTTP traffic between the internet and the computer doing the uptime monitoring.
You can access advanced settings in these tools to gain extra information, such as whether or not the tool is detecting that you have an SSL certificate installed.
DNS server monitor
The DNS protocol – running on DNS servers worldwide – converts a human-readable address like “example.com” to a unique IP address like 123.456.789, which each online computer in the world has to identify.
The DNS server monitor may give you detailed information on uptime, protocol errors, network outages, and more by running behind-the-scenes monitoring on the DNS server. The DNS must detect any mismatches between domains and their expected IPs that might be caused by an error or a deliberate hijacking by hackers. The tool can notify you of these issues immediately, which is better than being informed of them by a customer.
TCP port monitor
The Transmission Control Protocol ensures that no data is lost as information moves from one network device to another. Any connection issues between servers are quickly detected and flagged up. A good uptime monitoring tool will notify the user of any failed or incomplete transmission.
Waste No Time Getting Uptime to Prevent Downtime!
Software quality assurance depends heavily on uptime monitoring, and if entire portions of the world are unable to use your services promptly, your efforts will be in vain. It’s also not the kind of information you will always have in front of you because your website is likely hosted by a third-party supplier.
To ensure that you are immediately informed of uptime difficulties, it would be preferable if you had specialized software. Once you are, you may start your incident response strategy and address it before it affects too many users.
