It usually turns out that the control panel of a commercial website monitoring account may look rather confusing even for battle-hardened web administrators, let alone ordinary users.
Why do I single out commercial monitoring systems? Well, free monitoring services, as opposed to the paid ones, usually offer only simple HTTP ping, so you should provide your URL to be monitored and that's it. It is so easy that isn't even worth mentioning. On the other hand, rich feature set of the commercial monitoring services presupposes certain knowledge of the web technology.
Let's try and clear up how to set up the most typical tasks.
I. Non-secure websites (HTTP). In most cases you will be asked to provide:
- Task Name: just type in something to identify the current task, i.e.: My Blog;
- Maximum Connection Timeout (in seconds): for how long the web monitoring server tries to get connected with your site before it considers the connection failed and starts downtime notification;
- Request Type: Select either GET or POST;
- URL: the URL of the page to be monitored, i.e.: http://www.my-site.com/my-page.html;
- Keywords: you provide certain phrases from your web page, which web monitoring agents constantly scan the page for. If the agents fail to find the keywords, the page is probably hacked. (An agent is one of the servers of the web monitoring provider that simulates activity of a real user);
II. FTP Server:
- Task Name: nothing new here, just invent something self explanatory;
- Maximum Connection Timeout: don?t forget that timeout is usually counted in seconds;
- Server: your FTP server, i.e.: ftp://ftp.my-site.com;
- Username, Password: if you want monitoring agents to check the availability of files on your FTP server, provide your login and password;
- Get directory listing: if you select YES, the web monitoring agent will try to get the directory listing;
- Directory: if you specify the directory name here, the agent will switch to this directory just after it gets connected. I.e.: /files/;
- Check File: web monitoring agents will try to check the availability of the file, i.e. my-file.html;
- Download File: if you specify a filename, an attempt to download the file will be made. I.e.: my-file.html.
Commercial website monitoring services allow to monitor many more things: POP3/SMTP Servers, Network Devices (Ping/ICMP), Telnet, DNS servers, web services (SOAP), etc. This is what I am going to tell about next time.
To be continued?
Alexander Bogoslav is a Marketing Coordinator at Dotcom-Monitor.com. The company is famous for its premium-quality website monitoring services, as well as network monitoring tools and web load stress testing devices. You can find all Alexander's tutorials and articles at his website monitoring blog. | |
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