How does a website monitor work?
Website monitoring is a process that verifies the capabilities of a website or web service by using different tools to measure the website’s availability, functionality, security and performance. All these metrics ensure a superior user experience. Web monitoring can track actions of real users (Real User Monitoring –RUM) and/or track different test results done to a website.
Why is website monitoring important?
Website monitoring helps tackling issues such as security breaches, latency, downtime, it provides insights of how users interact with your website and it is a great tool for maintaining a good search engine ranking.
Some of the main advantages of website monitoring are:
1. Improves search engine results
Handling different performance issues, such as latency and rendering problems, will help increase traffic on your website and facilitate having a high rank in search results.
2. Decreases downtime
Most website monitor tools have the feature of sending instant alerts when detecting errors and issues that affect the functionality of a website. This feature has a big impact on reducing downtime, avoiding a low customer satisfaction for your business.
3. Safeguards your content and data through enhanced security
Constant checks for any security breaches are extremely important for any website that sells a service to online customers, protecting you from having unintended financial outcomes.
4. Ensures better conversion rates and increases your ROI
By adressing and preventing problems that have an impact on the smooth performance and on the user experience of your website, you can increase your conversion rates and keep a healthy level of online customers, thus the return on investment can greatly increase.
5. Enhances and maintains a website’s performance
Periodically monitoring your website data will help identify issues and prevent any unwanted consequences that could affect the well functioning and performance of your website.
How many types of website monitoring are there?
When it comes to location we can identify 2 types of website monitoring:
Traditional local monitoring
Its main focus is the well functioning of the website on the server. It will show that the website is correctly functioning as long as the server is running, disregarding the user experience.
Global Monitoring
Also known as end-user monitoring or end-to-end uptime monitoring, it identifies accessibility issues across the world, such as your website not being available to a specific geographic region because of DNS (Domain Name Server) problems.
More types of website monitoring are:
- Availability monitoring
- API monitoring
- Server availability
- Performance monitoring
- Functionality monitoring
- Real user monitoring (RUM)
Availability monitoring
Availability is the degree to which an IT infrastructure is in a protective and recoverable state in case of malware attacks, natural disasters and system failures. It identifies if a system is operating normally and it measures the effectiveness of the system’s recovery in case of any types of failures, and this is the reason why availability is one of the most important tools in information technology management. When it comes to managing a website, availability monitoring tools gather data from different sources and send alerts to the site’s owner, thus ensuring that any problem can be solved in a quick period of time.
Availability monitoring systems are used to monitor the API performance, server performance or any other application/system.
Availability can be represented as a specific measure of time, but mostly availability is represented as a percentage point metric:
Availability = Total Service Time – Downtime / Total Service Time
API monitoring
Before we explain what API monitoring means, we need to define what is an API: API stands for Application Programming Interface, a crucial software product. Nowadays the majority of organizations use internal microservices which run on cloud-based infrastructures and communicate with each other via internal APIs, whose specifications and documentation determine how to transfer information. In essence, an API contains the language and the norms of an interaction between two software systems. API monitoring is the process that evaluates the responses, performance and availability of an API and ensures that its requests are handled in a correct manner. The primary goal of this type of monitoring is to help solve API-related issues before they have a negative impact over an organization.
The key metrics of API monitoring
1. Latency: this metric represents the main indicator of an API’s performance. It measures the amount of time a request has to return a response. An increased latency can be the result of an overloaded server that does not have the capacity to carry out the number of requests entered at any given time.
API latency can be monitored through a ping test, logging and error tracking or by observing and identifying the microservices that lead to latency.
2. Errors: a sudden spike in API errors could mean that there are issues in the communication between two software products, issues that affect the user experience.
Common API error types:Authorization and Authentication Errors: these errors arise when there’s a problem with the permissions and credentials of an API call, such as incorrect API username or password or the API has the wrong permissions for the call made.
Data Errors: they can happen when there are any inconsistencies or inaccuracies in the data, such as missing or corrupted data.
Dependency Failures: because APIs often rely on dependent services, any fail of these services will cause errors in the API.
Errors with the rate limiter: if there are many requests sent during a short period of time, they will affect the rate limit of an API, thus resulting in errors such as 429 Too Many Requests.
Server Errors: when there is a problem with the server that can’t be solved on it’s own, errors such as 500 Internal Server Error will occur.
Validation Errors: If the API fails to validate a request, it will respond with a 400 validation error message. This can happen due to inconsistencies with the expected formats or constraints, such as data that doesn’t match to the required format of a field.
Timeouts: Timeout errors are the result of a delayed API call and they can cause failures in systems that depend on these calls.
3. Test results: these tests are mostly conceived and incorporated during the development phase of an API lifecycle, but they are usualy executed during the production phase. They validate the API records and behaviour, and a high number of failed test results indicate failures in the web app.
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