Can anyone recommend a website monitoring service? [closed]
Here's a breakdown of the major players in the external performance monitoring space:
Top Shelf
- Webmetrics.com - largest network, great monitoring technology, fun UI
- Keynote.com - focused on mobile, long time player in the space
- Gomez.com - lots of different products, product life cycle focus
Middle
- AlertSite.com - does a lot of things, nothing extremely well
- Pingdom.com - popular in the web 2.0 world
- site24x7.com - owned by zoho, cheap
- webmon.com - Supports escalations, custom triggers and realtime dashboards
Low End
- monitis.com
- siteuptime.com
- dotcom-monitor.com
What you need to look for in deciding between the various options:
- If you want to monitor a transaction, versus just a URL, you should try out the scripting technology to understand how easy/complicated it is to set up your monitoring.
- The monitoring network, how many locations around the world you want to get performance metrics from
- The alerting options, how configurable the thresholds/escalations are.
- The reporting, how useful the various reports/graphs are, and how much you can drill down into the nitty gritty.
For transaction and performance monitoring, I found AlertFox even more powerful than Keynote systems. When I checked (April 09) it was the only service that can monitor Flash and Java applet performance for a fair price.
Alertfox does only one thing (transaction monitoring) and it does that very well.
My personal preference is Pingdom. They've got several servers around the world, and the data is aggregated before sending you a "down" alert. They also provide information on uptime and reachability, so you can determine how many "9"s you're getting.