Basic Monitoring: Dynamic Websites

Dynamic websites are increasingly becoming more common on the web today.  Websites such as Amazon.com and yahoo.com offer dynamic content that changes each visit to a particular page.

Dynamic sites can potentially have more problems than static sites due to all of the pieces and parts that generate a web page for a website.  This is where continuous website monitoring software comes in.  By monitoring each piece in the website “puzzle”, one can identify a problem when it occurs.

For example, a website that has dynamic content will at a minimum employ a web server and a database server.  By monitoring both the web server and the database server for response times, one can determine if the web server is slow or if the database server is slow.

A good approach to monitoring this scenario is to monitor a web page that utilizes a database connection and to monitor the database by executing the one of the same database queries used on that page.  Ideally, the query should be a select statement that does not affect the data adversely.

Monitoring multiple web pages will increase monitoring coverage and eventually pinpoint trouble spots over time through trend analysis.