There are cases when users need to monitor not just one page, but a sequence of actions to make sure the whole application is working. For example do a login and then check the page after login, or add product to the shopping card and check shopping card etc. Mon.itor.us doesn’t do such transactional testing yet (although this feature is planned Q4/2006).

There is, however, a solution, which requires a little programming to be done. You can develop a new page which does such checks on the backend and then return OK or error. For example you can use http/html unit testing packages http://httpunit.sourceforge.net or http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net. Using these packages you can develop code which will send http requests to your page and check the response. Put this page under a new URL and then add monitoring for this page. So every time mon.itor.us checks this URL it ultimately checks the whole transaction sequence.

The main advantage of this method is that you get full control and you can make very sophisticated checks. Also when you change something in your site you know how it affects your controlling page and you can make appropriate changes. Of course this method works if you have such skills, but if you don’t, you may contact us or post a request on http://www.elance.com/ or http://rentacoder.com and get it done fast and at good price. Having such kind of control page is a good idea anyway regardless of monitoring.

Many Hosting providers guarantee 99% or 95% uptime. How much is that?

We have added second location for monitoring and now we have distributed monitoring from two geographical locations: Frankfurt (FRA) and Vienna (VIE).

In the near future we will add more locations for monitoring.

Some hosting companies provide network monitoring. Although there are critical differences between the provider’s internal monitoring and external network monitoring service like mon.itor.us. First, internal monitoring checks if the server and/or certain processes are up. Providers don’t check if a specific URL is available. So they can check that web server is up, but they would not check if your application is really functioning.

Another difference is that internal monitoring is watching the servers from within the provider’s data center (see on the picture). For you it means that you will get false positive report if the problem is on the firewall, router or external connectivity level. It is very possible that the firewall can be attacked through a Denial of Server attack (DoS), your application is not available during certain periods and you will not be notified. Another possibility is that due to network miscofiguration your application has poor visibility from certain geographical locations. Only external monitoring can ‘notice’ such an issue and notify you about site outages and report performance from end-user perspective.

Finally, hosting companies are interested in high uptime – you know what I mean …

Q: “I tried the SMS alert but I never got any SMS message when mon.itor.us detected downtime in one of the sites I manage”.

A:  Currently mon.itor.us is on beta release and it is free. That is why now you cannot get SMS notifications. But future releases will support SMS as well as IM types of alerting.

Q: Today I have received alert, but I’m positive that my router with IP
“some ip” didn’t lose its connection with the internet. I am getting too often false alarms from your server.

A: You will receive alert notification in the case if response time is above 3000 ms. Having response time more than that means your site is too slow and you might lose your clients.

The basic services will remain free and we will monetize it partially by using online advertisements. In next releases we will introduce advanced premium features, for which we will start charging – but only for the additional services.

Internal monitoring may tell you that a server is down inside your network or even that the outbound connection is having problems. But internal monitoring may not inform you that your web site is not available to the external user. Mon.itor.us provides monitoring tests from the external (outside of the firewall), or user perspective.  Many factors can impact website performance and website availability that will result in lost credibility and sales, including:

• Service interruptions or congestion on an ISP’s network
• Router failure
• Firewall problems
• Denial of service attacks
• Spikes in usage or degradation of server
• Server or equipment failures
• Software glitches.

Multiple monitoring servers run your tests at specific intervals 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year to insure that your customers and users can reach your website. If mon.itor.us detects a failure, an email alert is sent to you. When your website is active again, you are notified as well.

Our application tracks these failures and logs a report of the uptime/downtime of your website per day/week/month. These reports are available to you to in real time.

“Slow Websites Cost $25 Billion in Lost Sales! … This includes more than $21 billion per year lost when users abandon a website because of excessive delays in web page downloads.” according to Zona Research. According to KPMG, 40 percent of companies that suffer a major business disruption go out of business within two years because they are unable to recover from the long-term affects.