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What Should I Monitor?
The first device most people think of when they are planning to monitor their Internet presence is their Web server. However, there are a number of other devices and services that companies have deployed that need monitoring as well. Why? – because the more devices along the Web server chain that you monitor, the easier it is to determine from where the problem stems. For example, if your DNS went down, AlertMeFirst would not be able to find your Web site. If your Web site were the only Internet device you were monitoring, you would not know what was causing your site to be down. If, however, you had been monitoring both your DNS and Web site, you would have received two alerts: one, because your DNS was down and the other, because your Web site would be inaccessible. In this case, you would know immediately that your DNS was the cause of your Web site being inaccessible. Below are some common examples of Internet devices that need to be monitored. For a complete list of all the Internet devices that can be monitored, click here.
Email Monitoring For many companies, email service is often more important than any other service they provide. However, it can often take a long time before anyone realizes that there may be a problem with their email service. Regular monitoring of your SMTP (Simple Message Transfer Protocol), POP3 (Post Office Protocol) or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) server, may be the most important thing you can do to ensure your email services are always available to your customers. HTTP (Web Server) Monitoring By specifying a particular Domain Name (e.g. www.yahoo.com) and monitoring the HTTP protocol, you will be monitoring the "home page" or beginning file, as determined by the Web Server software's configuration. A common default is a file called index.html, so any file saved under that name in the root directory will be displayed if someone points a browser to that Domain Name. If AlertMeFirst gets a successful response back from the Web server, that means the default page is present, the Web Server software (IIS or Apache) is running and the DNS services of the Internet can find that particular Domain Name. If you want to make sure that other critical Web pages, besides the default page, are always functioning properly you should monitor each of them as well. This is especially true if these pages access another Web site or database server, as this will tell you if those devices are up and running as well. To gauge how your Web site's performance stacks up against your competitors, you may also want to monitor each of their sites. You will then be able to compare historical graphs of their performance versus yours. SSL or HTTPS (Secure Web Server) Monitoring More companies are starting to deploy encryption to make sure that any company data (credit card numbers, phone numbers, sales figures etc.) is protected and secure while in transit across the Internet. Encryption adds another level of complexity, which means there are now more functions (drivers, applications, certificates etc.) that can fail and prevent data from being protected. Web or FTP servers that have encryption enabled will often use it only on certain pages or files. This is why it is important to monitor both the encrypted and non-encrypted areas. DNS Monitoring In most cases, your ISP will use two different DNS (Domain Name Services) servers; a primary and a backup, to make sure your customers can find your Web server. While your ISP may use some internal monitoring tool to check for the proper functioning of these devices, it is wise to make sure that both these devices are always available to your customers. In addition, by comparing the response times of your ISP's DNS server and the response times of your Web server, you will have a very good idea of how congested or slow the Internet feed from your ISP to your site may be. FTP Monitoring File Transfer Protocol servers are used by many companies to make it easier to share files with outside groups such as vendors, business partners or employees working remotely. An FTP server is used to upload or download files without having to set up a Web server. If this service was unavailable for any length of time, or was slowing down because of heavy usage, slow Internet links etc. you need to know about it before your customers do. Router Monitoring You can use the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) protocol to check the response times of the routers that connect your local network to your ISP. By comparing the response time graphs of these devices with that of your Web or FTP server, you will be able to pinpoint any bottlenecks or performance issues. In the case of a complete outage, you will be able to quickly determine where the fault is; at your end, or your ISP’s end. |