Website monitoring is the process to check whether the user or visitors can interact with your website effectively and to check the uptime, functionality and performance of a website. Website monitoring can be done by self or hiring a service provider. Those companies will help the clients or organizations in continuous monitoring of websites.
Website monitoring falls into two categories they are:
- Synthetic Monitoring and
- Passive Monitoring
1. Synthetic monitoring
It is also known as active monitoring and it is a website monitoring done with the help of a web browser or else scripted data on web transactions. Here are some behavioral paths created through which visitors of the website can interact with the website or take on the site and these are monitored continuously to make sure that they have performed that includes response time, functionality and availability.
This type of monitoring has many advantages, and it is valuable because it can identify the problems such as website down-time before it affects users/visitors with the help of webmaster. This type of monitoring doesn’t really depend on the traffic of the website. It will enable businesses in checking the website or web applications that are new to customers continuously (24 X 7).
Synthetic testing is helpful to measure the response time and to check the availability of some critical transactions and pages and doesn’t show visitor/end-user interaction. It is also named as active monitoring because it consists of robots of web and synthetic probes, which helps in reporting the availability of system and also the predefined transactions. Synthetic monitoring when done along with passive monitoring helps business a lot.
2. Passive monitoring
Passive monitoring is also called as real monitoring. This is helpful in capturing the traffic from a network by making a copy of the traffic from a mirror or span port through a network tap. Implementation here is low risk which gives high value in application performance management. This can provide the details within a short timespan. It helps in providing a path for predictive analysis and performance trending. It can be analyzed on parameters like flow of traffic, etc.
This is very useful in performance problem trouble shooting when they occur. It is different from synthetic monitoring as it measures the web traffic and detects the problems after they occur. Usage of both at a time is complementary.
Therefore, perform synthetic monitoring along with passive monitoring, which benefits the business owners as well as organizations.