Also: Best web hosting services In our survey of website monitoring tools, we’re looking at 15 tools ranging in price from free to very much not free. Some can be set up in five minutes by a novice webmaster, and others require serious coding to integrate and analyze all aspects of a complex SaaS operation. All provide some level of alert management, so when things go bad, you can be woken up in the middle of the night, crawl out of a warm bed, feel your heart rate go up, remember back to your younger days when you wanted to be an artist but gave it all up for a steady income, and… well, you know. We’ve all been there. The bottom line is these tools and services can help you keep your site running and diagnose and fix things when they break, so things can get back to smooth operation. With that, let’s check them out.
Our process
Once again, I started with tools I’m personally familiar with. I’m a long-time paying customer of ManageWP and Sucuri, and I rely on them to keep my 16 sites updated and safe. I’ve also used some of the other tools on and off. We reached out to other webmasters and IT professionals for their recommendations. I also eliminated some popular tools because they didn’t have an alert mechanism. We looked more for services than products, because, when it comes to web monitoring, it’s better to test from around the world than from just your basement or data center. AlertSite monitors your websites, of course. But it also monitors the condition of the SaaS sites your company depends upon. One of our favorite features is DejaClick, a click-recording add-on for Chrome and Firefox that lets you create quick monitoring automations with, you guessed it, a click of the mouse. We also like that AlertSite enables you to create alert templates, set blackouts (where you don’t get alerts), and can send email and text alerts, along with integrations into other applications. That said, what we like most about AppDynamics is the dynamic nature of how it gathers and processes operational information. You place agents out on the nodes you want to monitor and AppDynamics gathers data from those nodes, builds up a baseline, and then notifies you when there’s a deviation from that baseline. This means, unlike many other monitoring solutions, you don’t have to know what you’re looking for before you start looking. You can set up AppDynamics and let it run, giving you feedback and helping you discover performance behaviors you might never have found otherwise. As you grow, you can add more monitoring checks. A mid-level plan costs $132 for a year of monitoring and adds checks and users. A more substantial plan costs $432 for a year, stores data for longer, lets you have more users, more integrations, and advanced monitoring. While the costs do go up considerably as you monitor more, the basic free plan is a no-brainer for any website operator. Host-Tracker also offers all the usual monitoring features, including alerts, HTTP, ping, SMTP, SNMP, TCP, and content monitoring, black lists, response time monitoring, and server load. But if you’re spending on Google Ads, the big win is definitely Host-Tracker’s Google Ads management. This one feature, alone, could well save you the cost of the service and then some. There’s a free plan that provides basic downtime monitoring, but it’s once you get into the premium and professional plans that provide you with automatic spam filtering, malware scanning, and automatic security fixes. Sure, there are other WordPress-optimized monitoring solutions out there, but this is the one supported and blessed by the folks who manage WordPress. Still, I’ve toyed with installing and then removing Jetpack because it’s just so cumbersome. If you’re a streamlined WordPress site operator, you might want to check out ManageWP or Sucuri (discussed later in this article). But it’s also got some healthy website monitoring chops. It doesn’t just test to see if a site is up, it does HEAD, GET, and POST requests to confirm your API is running solidly. It also does synthetic transactions, where it emulates browser performance to see how your site performs from the browser’s perspective. And, it can monitor and report performance trends (and performance problems). Beyond that, it performs intelligent anomaly detection and root cause analysis, which can help get your site back up and running quicker. But ManageWP does also offer monitoring, performance checking, link checking (to fix broken links), and uptime monitoring. Each of these are minor add-ons to the price, but I pay under $12 a month for my sites. If you run more than one WordPress site, this is a must-use service. Monastic is free for open-source projects that post a banner on its GitHub page. Otherwise, there are programs ranging from $5 per month up to $50 per month and that gets you support for various check intervals, URLs to monitor, frequency of testing, number of status pages, and number of SMS messages. The thing is, there’s not much here, here. We’ve heard a lot of positive recommendations about Monastic, but we’re not sure we see it. We’re including it in this list because a number of our readers asked us to, but it’s very much a service that you have to use before you can find out what it will do for you. In terms of what it does, the compelling starting point is how quick and easy it is to setup. You can specify URLs or machines to monitor and TeamViewer Web Monitoring does the rest. If you want agent-level monitoring, you can install them in Windows and Linux machines. Plus, the dashboard is crystal clear, helping you see the health of your entire network at a glance. Beyond that, there’s an open API, so you can integrate custom monitoring deeply into your own platform requirements. New Relic has an AI component that can detect, filter, and group incidents so that you’re non inundated with lots of notifications. By integrating the New Relic AI capabilities into your custom-programmed monitoring capabilities, you can extend your apps with detailed monitoring, analysis, and intelligence. But the free tests are only the beginning. If you truly want to analyze and improve your site’s performance, Pingdom’s professional tools can help you drill down deep inside your application or site’s performance and locate problems and bottlenecks. You can also track uptime statistics, get alerts, perform real-time analysis, and more. When it comes to understanding exactly what your app is doing under a real load, with real user interactions, it’s possible to optimize, fix, and improve overall website performance. And, as we all know, the better the website performance, the better the visitor retention, and the more likely it is that your visitors will convert to leads or customers. The hack was such a mess that I had to reach out to them to perform emergency mitigation. Since then, going on six years now, I’ve been paying for this monitoring service. While the upsite monitoring is a table-stakes feature, what stands out about Sucuri is malware monitoring. It scans websites for malware and also operates a website firewall that helps prevent malware from getting through. The proof of its claims? My sites have stayed clean since I signed up. If you spend a few bucks, you can boost checks to every minute, monitor SSL, get SMS notifications and voice calls, check API performance by scanning HEAD, GET, and POST https responses, and more. We particularly like that nearly all functions of Uptime Robot can be managed programmatically via REST API calls. At just $7 per month, there’s a lot to like, even with the paid plan. One of the more interesting features of Uptrends is the use of Chrome, Firefox, and, surprisingly enough, IE. Ir runs tests that allow you to see how performance fares, not just based on low-level network requests, but from each browser’s perspective. In this way, you can identify any unique browser-level problems that you’ll need to chase down and fix.
How to choose
If you’re budget-constrained, we present a number of free services. They are usually limited by the number and frequency of tests they perform, and whether they’ll send you alerts through anything other than email. So if you can live with relatively infrequent testing and email alerts, the free options are a great place to start. On the other end of the spectrum, if you’re running a complex SaaS installation with a lot of API interaction and paying customers depending on your service’s performance, you might want to go with some of the more comprehensive services. Look for offerings with machine learning so you can prevent alert storms. Look for services that not only test API performance, but perform REST, HEAD, POST, and GET checks. Look for tools that don’t just let you know when your site is down, but can help you figure out why. For everyone else, there’s bound to be a sweet spot. There are a lot of great options out there. I always recommend you start off making a list of your needs, requirements, and worries, and then compare the offerings of each service against your list. When you do, you’re bound to find one (or, like me, more than one) that fits your needs. When you do, let us know in the comments below. How are you making sure your sites stay running and safe? Feel free to share your experiences with everyone. You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.
