What Is Website Monitoring?

Comprehensive website monitoring used to be about complex management packages that required servers of their own running on premises. Fortunately, the cloud has changed all that. Today's website monitoring tools run as managed services, and provide intuitive new interfaces that give anyone a graphical, command center view of their website's critical metrics, including site traffic, load balancing and latency metrics, website health, and numerous other factors. Together, these determine how your online presence stands up to everything from e-commerce surges to large-scale web outages. Even more importantly than monitoring traffic to the front end of your site, these critical management applications can help you allocate resources and scale your web server capacity to save money while performing more efficiently.

Web servers run far more than websites these days. Data collection, marketing campaigns, media outlet, storefronts, and applications that span the gamut of business functions, all are common residents of your average web server. With these machines carrying these kinds of critical payloads, it behooves IT to make sure they know exactly what's going on with every web server in their domain—all the time and down to the last detail.

In today's web and mobile-first environment—in which an organization's success or failure often hinges on its consumer-facing apps and how they're consumed and perceived—in-depth management knowledge is of paramount importance. That job falls on website and app monitoring services. Think of them as Sauron's all-seeing eye, but devoted entirely to your web servers and directly related infrastructute. Some solely watch others combine their monitoring capabilities with some immediate management tools with which IT can perform quick fixes and other tasks. They all use the same string of buzzwords ("single pane of glass," "comprehensive visibility," an outside-in view," "an inside-out view," or "a top-to-bottom view," and so on) when monitoring your website's performance.

There's truth in all of those descriptions, but each of the website monitoring services reviewed for this roundup does the job differently. Plus, some are best suited for large enterprises (such as AppDynamics and New Relic Browser, our two Editors' Choice for enterprises) while others are best suited for for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) (such as SmartBear AlertSite Pro, our Editors' Choice for SMBs). These website monitoring services are useful not only for the IT staff managing website and apps within a business but for the tech-savvy executives (and not-so-tech-savvy executives) monitoring a website to gain specific business intelligence (BI). The best services—such as our three Editors' Choices—are the ones that don't make executives work too hard to find the information they need.

Getting the Fundamentals Right

Each website monitoring service reviewed has its strong points in terms of the features and functionality it offers but, to work for a modern business, there are a couple of core components each service must have in one form or another. Such components include browser monitoring, mobile monitoring, a combination of real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic performance monitoring; business-relevant reporting and analytics, and real-time alerting capabilities.

All 10 website monitoring services reviewed offer browser and app monitoring through a combination of different web-based dashboards. These dashboards range in customizability, level of detail, and graphical ingenuity—from simple lists and grid layouts to interactive maps, complex flowcharts, and mix-and-match tile dashboards. They're all designed to give businesses the information they need on a website's performance and user experience (UX), often using a traffic light-style, red/yellow/green color scheme.

When checking on whether or not your website is working the way it should in real time, it's easier at first glance to show a business user a big red or green number—or an actual smiley or frowny face (such as what Dynatrace UEM shows you) rather than inundating a business user with page response times, latency, error percentages, and a host of other metrics right away.

As the website monitoring services dig deeper into exactly which components of a website are working, how exactly they choose to present that data is key. Dynatrace UEM and SmartBear AlertSite Pro use tile-based, prebuilt, and custom dashboard layouts that are full of all manner of charts, graphs, and maps, pulling in the precise website analytics metrics a specific user within a business might need. That may be reports from synthetic bots testing the load time of specific user flows, RUM data breaking down the percentages of the different browsers and operating systems (OSes) on which users are running, or how specific transactions (such as the load time on an e-commerce page or abandoned shopping carts on a retail website) translate to a business's revenue.

For example, Pingdom uses one specific metric called uptime (i.e., HTML availability on a page) to quickly indicate website performance. Ghostery MCM is laser-focused on the wealth of third-party tags populating the front end of a website and conceptualizes them all in an innovative TrackerMap that visualizes the inner workings of a website. AppDynamics has both custom dashboards and an app flow map that is similar to Ghostery MCM's layout, but which shows the data flowing back and forth (between not only front-end website nodes and services but back-end databases and servers as well).

All of that monitoring and analytics data then has to get to the right people within an organization, and quickly enough for them to take action on errors, outages, or performance issues that could cost a business money. This is where comprehensive reports and detailed alert policies come in. Depending on the website monitoring service, this is done through a combination of email reports and notifications, text and phone alerts, and integrations that hook into other communication and collaboration platforms.

The best alerting capabilities among the products reviewed were from Pingdom and SmartBear AlertSite Pro, although AppDynamics wasn't far behind. With alerts, it's as much about accuracy and relevance as it's about the speed of real-time notifications. AppDynamics and Pingdom not only send quick, detailed alerts to the users within a business that need the information, but they offer deep root cause analysis to sift through a website's inner workings to identify whatever cog is acting up (be it a specific content request, error page, malformed piece of code, or overloaded server). SmartBear AlertSite Pro's multistep alerts for different performance thresholds were, overall, the fastest reviewed, containing the most accurate and relevant information.

Choosing a Monitoring Service That Fits

When it comes to the steep pricing and sheer scale offered by some website monitoring services, the product that makes the most sense for one business won't necessarily even fit another. That's why we named three Editors' Choices. AppDynamics offers the heftiest platform packing the most features but, at $3,300 per unit for each product making up the overall solution plus a lot of deeper application performance management (APM) functionality SMBs may not need, it's not as well-suited for a start-up or a SMB still in its early stages. For an international corporation or other large enterprise that needs to monitor dozens of apps and services, AppDynamics and New Relic Browser are our two Editors' Choices. Dynatrace UEM is also a fantastic (but expensive) website and app monitoring service that does everything an enterprise needs.

If your business is purely desktop-focused on what front-end components are taking up the most space and how your website's tags are impacting performance, it may be worth investing in the unique monitoring strategy offered by Ghostery MCM. SmartBear AlertSite Pro, our Editors' Choice for SMBs, and Pingdom are the website monitoring services with more delineated pricing tiers for businesses of various sizes. The plan you choose depends on the add-ons, integrations, and additional services your SMB may need—not to mention the service's overall ease of use, whether it's the business managers or developers and IT folks within the organizations who are primarily using the platform.

In totality, Editors' Choices AppDynamics and New Relic Browser stood above the rest for enterprise, as did SmartBear AlertSite Pro for SMBs. But website monitoring services are not one-size-fits-all, and all 10 products in this roundup can offer unique combinations of services that could be just the thing for your particular website.

As a living and breathing document, some of the tools listed today may not be listed in a year, as scores may change and new products may be added to the roundup. As you try solutions, be sure to check in with us to see if any new software has been added to this roundup.