Website monitoring is critical for every business website. As it affects the search engine ranking, reputation and credibility of your site. Any serious issue associated with it, can become a nightmare for a business owner. In this post, you will see what is website monitoring and its types.
What is website monitoring?
Website monitoring is a process of testing the performance of the website in terms of its availability and functionality. This helps you be one step ahead before your customers complaint.
Types of website monitoring: There are mainly two types of website monitoring.
- Synthetic monitoring
- Passive monitoring
What is synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring imitates the behavior of the web browser. Here, the scripts are programmed to mimic the actions that the end user do on website. These actions are regularly monitored to know the performance of the website – availability, functionality and the response time of pages and transactions. This is a form of test that helps you to identify the issues of your website before it affects your end-users.
From multiple points, it finds the performance and connectivity problems – website or its applications are slow or experiencing downtime. For this process, it doesn’t require actual web-traffic and you can test website applications continuously to know its availability and performance.
Benefits of active monitoring
- It’s a planned activity, you can detect the issue in website applications before it affects the customers.
- It can be done from inside the network or from multiple points on the Internet.
- If your website is designed for globally, you can test the performance of your website in different geographical locations. And, you will get a holistic view of the geographically distributed users.
- It provides metric form an end-user perspective.
What is passive monitoring?
Passive monitoring is also known as “real user monitoring”. It records all the users interactions with the website and its applications. These records are very important to determine whether your website is working as you expected – error free, quick web page loading time or else experiencing any downtime or any part of the system is failed.
Software as a service (SaaS) and application service providers (ASP) use real user monitoring to deliver quality service to their clients. There are software applications that enable you to find the end user’s experience, where they clicked, measures response time, etc.
Benefits of real user monitoring
- It helps you to know the end user experience over your website or web applications.
- It records the users interactions on your website and you can use this data for generating test scripts (synthetic monitoring).
- Based on the end-user experience, you can resolve the issues quickly.