Where the Blogs At?

Recently we have been searching many different blogs to find what information concerning website monitoring. After searching through sites like Technorati, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Google blog search and other search engines we have come up pretty blank. However, we did manage to find a few blogs that talk about the importance of website monitoring and related services. If anyone has or finds any good blogs be sure to let us know!

Monitoring Guide
Web/Networks/SEO/Monitoring Related Blog

This blog is dedicated to topics related to website monitoring. The most recent post talks about the importance of monitoring frequently. You want to find a site which monitors more then once every 60 minutes since downtimes can be for shorter periods of time. Web companies normally state there servers are up 99% to 99.9% which doesn't sound like allot but the difference between the two is 80 hours per year. In total this means that you website is down for around 4 days a year.

seosourcecenter.com

This blog has a lot of good info on all aspects of promoting websites and ways to improve businesses. There was a good post about the importance of site rankings. You want your site to rank high but you can't just wait for traffic to come. In an ever changing environment you need to track your own site versus your competitor's. Web owners will compete for the highest ranking but luckily this isn't a problem since there are many tools available to see how you are doing.

Technical News

This blog is mainly about technical news and business reports but there is a posting about the importance of protecting yourself from hackers. You really need to make sure that your website isn't down from hackers, especially during buying seasons. You can start a 14 day trial version at Atwatch Advanced Website Monitoring Today! They can help you thru the tough financial times and can defend you from hackers and much more.

Web Hosting Blog
Hosting Events & Facts
aliax

This is a web hosting blog but has several postings concerning monitoring. In a recent post Aliax gives 5 reasons why you want to use website monitoring. For instance you don't want to hear customers complain; you can't trust hosting companies all the time, you want your website available around the world, your company could expand too quickly and you need to keep up with changes, and you want to be known as a reputable and trustworthy business. There are also postings which talk about web load stress testing and web monitoring reality. Check it out.

Edtechpost

This blog is hosted by Scott Leslie who is an educational technology researcher and emerging technology analyst. His blog has info on things like e-learning, social learning, learning design, etc. One of his posts talks about the importance of web monitoring. He was having some problems with his server but he didn't want to buy any software. Scott came across montastic and has been using it ever since. He believes it's easy to use and ideal for any average instructor or blogger and recommends it to others.

Mind the Uptime to Increase Web Site Crawl Rate

Ann Smarty analyzed 10 ways for making web sites important and valuable for search engines. "Note that you can’t force Googlebot to visit you more often - what you can do is to invite it to come", she said.
Server uptime and page load time are listed among the 10. Nowadays search engines, including Google look at their search techniques work for humans and likes and dislikes similar to human actions. If site is slow or doesn't work regularly, SE don't add value to those pages.

These quality guidelines make Webmasters spend their time and energy to a much better user experience.

Application Monitoring for Banks and Financial Institutions

Server, application, network and website monitoring are very important for a flourishing e businesses. There are several very important monitoring needs for banks and financial institutions to be successful and maintaining their reputation. One of them is application performance monitoring. Online banking reduces costs and improves customer satisfaction. But unavailability of the service has an adverse affect.

Here's an example:
o Internal IT monitoring reports 100% uptime, but the bank gets customer complaints
o The bank starts losing loyal customers and banking transactions were reduced

Simple availability monitoring does not provide full customer experience measure to be able to reduce complaints and improve the service quality. Banking experience consists of steps consisting in a workflow. This is where an external application performance monitor can discover the issue.

It will monitor every step within a transaction and show and reveal the missing link.



Application monitoring provides important information which banks can use to compel the system integrator for better service levels and could improve the reputation and customer loyalty.





Application monitoring is necessary for the smooth flow of transactions. User interaction with the applications is an important aspect involved in website monitoring.

Easy start with IT Management and Monitoring

Mon.itor.Us Overview of Free Website Monitoring Service

5 Aspects of Website Monitoring with Monitis

Use Monitis to Improve Page Landing Speed: Pay Less for Google AdWards Ad

To ensure high quality ad experience for their visitors google now evaluates ad destination pages according to the page landing speed. The Advertisers must provide high performance of web pages they want to advertise on AdWords. The higher the load speed, the less is Cost-Per-Click (CPC) rate. According to Google high quality landing pages should provide relevant and original content, transparency and navigability.

On-going monitoring checks availability and calculates performance of web pages. Measurements help prevent not only from being disqualified or banned by AdWords, but save advertisement costs. Setting performance thresholds will allow prevent unnecessary page load delays. Here's how can Monitis be used by Marketers and Advertisers:

Monitis External Monitoring module allows you to perform page load tests, measure redirect time, implement functional checks as well check availability of relevant content:


Response time to http request (HTTP)

Availability of relevant content (Content Matching)

User experience with functional parts of the website (Post Data)















Monitis DNS lookup test checks the time required for name server to look up for the IP address.


The browser can't download anything from this hostname until the DNS lookup is completed.





Monitis DNS monitoring report shows average lookup time in milliseconds and min. and max. values.

Allowed time is 20-120 milliseconds. Exceeding the time will decrease the quality of the web page.

80-90% of the end-user response time is spent downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc.

Monitis Transaction Module (TM) allows to measure page load time to threshold and alert when page loading is slow.

According to AdWords guidelines page load time threshold is the regional average plus three seconds.

Monitis TM allows you to set the threshold on each step within the workflow. Steps consist of components loading during page execution. Time is measured in milliseconds.

Transaction fails, when one of the step is slow due to components load time exceeding the set thresholds.

Monitis TM measures end-user experience with the critical path or workflow to improve navigability.


Detailed diagnostics of the problem allows to proactively fix and improve site overall Quality Score.

eBusinesses to Use Monitis Measure Return on IT Investment

Nowadays websites compete on the ever changing landscape of the internet. One of the most common challenges of online business owners is increasing a return on their investment and improving there chances of success. Businesses investing in IT operations and web marketing expect traffic and ranking to grow.

It is comparatively easy to measure the investment spent on IT infrastructure and resources, hosting and technical support, marketing and advertising.

What's called ROI for website are described as availability, performance, functionality, traffic and popularity.

Here are 5 tips using Monitis to measure the effectiveness of the IT investments.

Monitoring Website Performance - TIP 1
HOW WELL DOES THE WEBSITE SERVE MY CUSTOMERS?
Chart 1 - Monitis measures my web customer experience in terms of page availability and access speed. Real time reports in milliseconds include results from 5 different geographic locations.

Chart 1


Q. - Is my site productive according to this chart?
A. - No, because in one week it was "closed for business" about 54 hours!!!)








Monitoring Networks and Systems - TIP 2
CAN I GET SOME DETAILED DIAGNOSTICS?
Monitis also measures server CPU, memory consumption by process, providing a chart for comparison (see Chart 2).

Chart 2

Q.- So the downtime correlates to server CPU and
resource memory utilization?!
A. - Yes, you can see why your site was not
responding at certain hours of the day

Transaction Monitoring - TIP 3
DOES THE CHECKOUT WORKFLOW WORK?
It is easy to record website critical workflow in Monitis transaction monitoring module and let the service monitor business critical transactions.

Chart 3Q. - Some red dots, what are those?
A. - They take to detailed view of the report
to show which step failed (Chart 4).

Chart 4Q. - Can I get more information about the failure?
A. - Just click on the "red" and
you will see as is in Chart 5

Chart 5

Q. - I see: some scripts load slow :(
A. - Yes, and you also can get a
screenshot of the problem page

Monitoring Website Traffic - TIP 4
DO I KNOW MY CUSTOMERS
Monitoring traffic shows how many unique visits I have and page views, where my clients come from, how they found my site and keywords they used in search engines.

Charts 6

Q. - Looks like Google Analytics?!
A. - Yes, but you can compare web traffic with website performance and availability. And discover how much time you reject your customers at peak hours.?

Search Engine Monitoring - TIP 5
I NEED TO BE AWARE OF MY SITE POPULARITY
Monitoring site by important keywords reveals that my site performs quite high in some keywords, but also my weaknesses in some important keywords.

Chart 7

No Excellence Without Measurement!