Effective Web Server Monitoring
If you aren’t measuring performance, you are letting your
customers down.
Monitoring of your web servers is a critical task that
involves more than just ensuring uptime and downtime. As proven by countless analysts, focus
groups, and experts in the field website visitors leave your website for a variety
of reasons. One big reason is slow
response time.
Measuring response time allows you to establish a baseline that
can be improved upon through ongoing monitoring. Tools, such as WebWatchBot,
will collect data over time, helping you establish a baseline and measure changes.
Response time of a particular web page consists of more than
just pinging an IP address, connecting to the web server port, or simply
downloading the HTML source. To fully
grasp the user experience of what the “real” response time is, every piece of
the web page must be downloaded. This
includes HTML and images. Server
monitoring at this level ensures that you are getting a clear picture of what
is happening on your website.
Effective server monitoring also includes monitoring more
than just one web page of one particular server. Each web page is different. A static page with a few images will respond
differently than a web page that loads content from a database as will a web
page that has no images and so on. A
good server monitoring plan includes monitoring various web pages on a website
to gather a more complete view.
After collecting data over a 30 day period, trends will
begin to emerge. Your web server may
respond slowly during certain hours of the day, days of the week, or days of
the month when more visitors hit the site.
Once a trend is established, you can begin to take action. If the website is slow on a particular day,
determine if there is unusually heavy traffic on that day with your web hosting
company or your Internet connectivity provider.
If a particular web page is slower than other web pages, determine if
there are problems connecting to a database or if images are too large and need
optimizing.
Server monitoring is not a monumental task. It takes some initial planning, good server monitoring
software to automate data collection and present the results.
