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 to assure website availability. 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 100% uptime and fast and reliable access to the website.
PRTG installs easily and its usage is intuitive. Additional features like remote management (via web browser or PocketPC) and error notifications 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 web 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 (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.
High loads caused by a large number of users accessing a website at the same time can also slow down a webserver. That is why we highly recommend to perform a load test when setting up your webserver to know how much load your web servers can handle. Paessler also offers a tool for webserver performance tests: Webserver Stress Tool!
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 web 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 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 testour software 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 $380 / €250.
