Website Monitoring

What Does Website Monitoring Mean?

Website monitoring is the process of testing and logging the status and uptime performance of one or more websites. This monitoring tool ensures that websites are accessible for all users and is used by businesses and organizations to ensure that website uptime, functionality and performance are always up to standard.

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Techopedia Explains Website Monitoring

Website monitoring can be done locally within a data center’s firewall where a website is hosted or globally through multiple test sites. Often, this monitoring tool is provided by the service provider through a Web portal with desktop and mobile versions.

There are two ways to monitor websites:

  • Traditional local monitoring: Focuses on the health of the website on the server and may not reflect the experience of a user. As long as the server is running, it appears on local monitoring that the website is functioning as expected.
  • Global monitoring: Tests and monitors uptime and may even identify issues across the Internet backbone. For example, the website may be accessible from most parts of the globe, but not from a specific region because of DNS issues. Global monitoring may spot this, so that the specific issue can be remedied by updating or fixing the DNS server in question. Because of this, global monitoring is also known as end-user monitoring or end-to-end uptime monitoring, which monitors availability and performance experienced by actual users. Thus, it is ideal for diagnosing individual incidents and tracking the impact of website changes.
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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…