Website Monitoring

Website Availability

Businesses and organizations have come to depend on their websites to share information as well as promote and sell goods. In today’s world, maintaining a high-performing, dependable website is vital for success. For this reason, network administrators must know the status of their websites. PRTG Network Monitor software provides continuous website monitoring and automated alerts if the webserver is down or slow to respond.

A good website monitoring solution offers the following benefits:

  • Increased profits: no losses caused by undetected website failures.
  • Improved customer satisfaction by assuring fast and reliable access to the website.

This website monitoring solution installs easily and its usage is intuitive. Additional features like remote management (via web browser, PocketPC, or Windows client) and notifications about website errors by email, ICQ, pager/SMS make the monitoring of webpages easier.



Website Monitoring Made Easy

PRTG Network Monitor is the powerful network and website monitoring solution from Paessler AG. This advanced network monitoring software monitors the availability of network components and websites, while also measuring traffic and usage. It will reduce costs by helping to prevent outages, ensuring website performance, optimizing connections, saving time and controlling service level agreements (SLAs).

You can quickly and easily set up website monitoring using PRTG Network Monitor. The different sensor types used for website monitoring (HTTP, HTTP Content, HTTP Advanced, HTTP Transaction Sensors etc...) allow simple http requests, as well as simulation of operations and steps a website visitor takes, e.g. a user login or passing data to a form.



Setting up Your Website Monitoring

You can easily setup website monitoring using HTTP sensors to get the current status (up or down) of your website. To accomplish this, when creating a new sensor you simply enter the URL of the website to be monitored.  For details on how to setup HTTP-sensors, please refer to the online manual.

Using PRTG Network Monitor's HTTP Transaction Sensors, you can monitor a sequence of URLs on a web server. This is useful for verifying that your website is functioning fully, e.g. putting products into a shopping cart and then making sure that the checkout is working properly.

Another important sensor type for website monitoring is the HTTP Content Sensor. This sensor requests a HTTP URL and parses the result for a value enclosed in brackets "[value]". The most common use is to monitor some value inside a web server for validity. For example, if you have a script or CGI running on the web server that simply publishes the free disk space or the current processor usage, you can actually monitor these values as well as many others.



In the context of website monitoring PRTG's DNS and FTP sensors are also extremely useful. The DNS sensor sends a request to access a specific domain name or IP address. This is useful e.g. to ensure that your company's web server address can be reached by the outside world or to check a DNS server in a LAN for availability.
The FTP sensor checks, if file transfer is processed successfully and if the FTP server is available.

You can find more configuration tips on how to setup website monitoring using the HTTP Transaction sensors in our online knowledge base article.

 


Free Website Monitoring

You can test website monitoring with the 30-Day-Trial-Edition of PRTG Network Monitor. The Freeware Edition is completely free for personal and commercial use and may be downloaded for free. The Commercial Editions are required if you want to monitor more than ten sensors. Licenses for PRTG Network Monitor start at $295 / €195.