Types Of Website Monitoring

As online business has started reaching leaps and bounds, it has become important for a company to be in touch with their existing or potential customers round the clock.
Be its a small or a large organization, it is very important to set up a website for their own and be online 24*7 to ensure the online assistance for their world wide clients. This would be possible only when the website is up. In the case of a site going down, the company is sure to meet the consequences of heavy loss. The internal and external website monitoring comes into rescue only during this time.

Website monitoring services monitor the performance of the websites, monitor the downtime, uptime and websites response time and give alerts through emails, SMS, twitter and RSS feed. There are many free and paid website monitoring services available for this purpose.

Many advanced techniques are used in the monitoring methodology. Below discussed are some of the types of techniques available. Inside / internal and outside / external monitoring are the two major types available.

Internal / Inside Monitoring:
sA site may experience a downtime due to several reasons. When a performance of a site can be measured from inside the firewall is called as internal / inside website monitoring. It is the traditional network management technique. The reasons for the low performance would be due to connection failure to the public internet, some flaws in the design of applications etc. This can be corrected through the special hardware appliances.

Outside Monitoring / External Monitoring:
The other type is the outside monitoring. In this, the issues exist outside the firewall possible in the internet backbones. The other name given for this is end user performance monitoring.

The types of the monitoring applications can further be divided into active or passive monitoring.

Active Monitoring:
In active monitoring, which is otherwise called as synthetic monitoring, a script with common behavioral of the browser navigation in the particular site is simulated and it is kept monitored at certain time intervals. The response and the performance are measured. With this technique we can ensure that before the end user goes through the problem it can be corrected by the web master. This is quite a good technique but sometimes when the there is a little diversion from the commonly predicted browser behavior, this technique will not work.

Passive Monitoring:
In passive monitoring, a copy of the traffic called the mirror traffic is created and it is used to monitor the performance of traffic to the site. The other name given to the passive monitoring is real user monitoring. In this technique, the session of the website and the errors in a site that occurred during a session are captured for monitoring purposes.

Synthetic and passive website monitoring are actually complementary to each other.
The difference in the passive and active synthetic monitoring relies on the actual inbound traffic to the website. These methods ensure that the servers, websites and databases stay online and secure.