I did a podcast over at Leading Edge Technology last Friday that I wanted to post on as well. The show was about monitoring your web site and/or web applications. The show outline read:
There is nothing worse than providing a web application to your customers and then it not performing the way it should (or worse still, be unavailable you not realize it).
In today's show I talk about a set of services that you can use to monitor you site and simulate traffic from all over the world.
We recently launched an incredible web application within our organization that is being used by a global audience. It is critically important to us that this web application is up and running at all times for our client (and our client's clients). So I began testing two services that constantly monitor this site. If the performance degrades (i.e., the pages are taking a long time to load), I get an alert. If the site for some reason doesn't come up at all, I get emailed a critical alert and I know that some action needs to be taken.
To carry out this testing I'm looking at AlertSite and Keynote. Both of these tools / services are very robust. What I like is the ability to sample our web application from different places in the world. For example, I can see the response time that a user in Hong Kong would experience versus a user in New York. I can tell if I have performance degrading for all cities (which means it is an issue with our internet link), or if a performance issue is localized.
I haven't reached a conclusion as to which of the two tools I find most useful, but I'll update you with the final verdict when I make it in about 2 weeks time.
Interesting service. It isn't clear what the fee structure is. How do they charge for the service? Is it per page they check or per city they check from?
Sam
Posted by: Sams | June 05, 2006 at 09:29 PM