Beyond “Is It Up?” – Website Monitoring should be Comprehensive

When it comes to monitoring websites, the question most often asked is, “Is the site up?” While this is certainly an essential aspect, the answer hardly paints the whole picture. True website monitoring involves a plethora of factors that can affect the user experience and performance. These factors can often be hidden, and your user’s experience of you site might not be the same as what you are seeing from your network. With NodePing’s suite of tools, you have the ability to dig deep and understand the vital aspects of your website’s functionality. Let’s explore these considerations.

DNS Monitoring

Domain Name System (DNS) is the backbone of internet navigation, converting human-friendly URLs into IP addresses. Monitoring DNS health is crucial as an unresponsive DNS can render your site unreachable. Problems with DNS can be hidden by caching, and we are often asked why we are notifying about a site that seems to be working from the owner’s perspective. The answer is often that the site owner’s browser or DNS caching is making the site appear to be working when in fact for people who haven’t been on the site recently it appears to be offline because of DNS problems. NodePing offers robust DNS checks to ensure that your DNS servers are resolving correctly.

Monitoring Status Codes

Like with DNS, just checking with a browser can also miss situations in which the web server is actually responding with an error because the modern browsers try to show the page if they can. We often get messages from customers who’s website appears to be working but is actually returning status codes that indicate errors on the site. Even if the site looks right in your browser at the moment, you need to know if it is returning a status code in the 500 range indicating the server is throwing an error. Many content management systems or frameworks also return a visible page with a 404 Not Found status. NodePing’s HTTP checks watch for status code problems with your site.

Similarly, it is important to know if your site is properly following redirects. On some checks, you want the monitoring to follow the redirect to ensure that is getting the final page, and that page is responding with a 200 status code. You may also want to test specific URL’s for the 302 response as well. NodePing’s HTTP Advanced check allows you to ensure that a URL is returning a specific redirect response code.

SSL Certificate Validation

SSL certificates encrypt data transferred between users and your servers. Monitoring and receiving warnings about certificate expirations help you maintain trust and protect sensitive user information. Many of our check types include SSL validation, and and there is also a specialized SSL check that warns you if a certificate has a problem, as well as notifying you that your certificate will expire in a certain number of days. With NodePing, stay ahead with timely reminders and validations.

Domain Registration Expiration and the WHOIS Check

Keep track of your domain registration status with NodePing’s WHOIS checks. Understanding the ownership and registration details ensures that you stay in control of your domain and can prevent unexpected downtime.

Monitoring Other Services on the Host

If your website relies on additional services like databases or caching servers, monitoring them alongside the main site is essential. Integrating these checks into your monitoring strategy ensures that all parts of your site are functioning seamlessly.

CDN & Proxy Consideration

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and proxies enhance site performance but can complicate monitoring. By monitoring the back-end site directly, NodePing allows you to quickly pinpoint whether the issue lies with the CDN, helping you react quickly to any problems.

Tying It Together

Every notification your receive from your monitoring system should be actionable. Otherwise it becomes noise, and you either waste time or start ignoring alerts and miss important events. It is important to monitor every aspect of your site, but you don’t necessarily want ten notifications when the site is down. NodePing allows you to set a check as being dependent on another check, so you won’t get a stack of notifications if the dependent checks fail together.

Automated Diagnostics

NodePing’s has both on demand and automated diagnostics tools that provide extra insights when your site is down, supplying valuable information to help troubleshoot and resolve issues more efficiently.

Conclusion

Monitoring a website involves much more than merely checking if it’s up. With tools like NodePing, you can dive into a multitude of factors that contribute to your site’s performance and reliability. By understanding and keeping tabs on DNS, redirects, SSL certificates, domain registration, host services, CDN considerations, and more, you ensure a smooth user experience and robust site functionality.

At NodePing, we’re committed to helping you monitor your website from all angles. Get in touch with us to learn how you can take your website monitoring to the next level. If you don’t have an account yet, give it a try with our 15-day, free trial.