Its main value lies in the simple fact that if you don't know what your problem is, you can't fix it. Monitoring won't help solve all your problems. A team of Google employees actually wrote a book, Site Reliability Engineering (freely available to read here) that has become a reference guide for site reliability engineering teams all over the world.

Google understands this - and in fact, the tech giant devotes an enormous number of resources to ensure that its websites remain highly available and lightning fast.

There is too much at stake to ignore the importance of monitoring your website and business-critical services. Since the Site Reliability Engineering team can't monitor every component manually, they have to use monitoring tools that provide easy-to-read dashboards that display information about website performance and alert them as soon as anything looks problematic. Without these alerts, the team would only be aware of any issues when they started receiving customer complaints, which is too late. To do this, they would want to create automated alerts that would let them know when the site is having any issues, so that they can fix them as quickly as possible. The Site Reliability Engineering team at Google would want to know as soon as this started happening. Imagine what would happen if Google's search results started to take 10 seconds to load, or even worse, started timing out completely. For example, if your business is featured on an episode of Shark Tank, and your website can't handle the increased traffic from all of the viewers, you won't just lose customers - your entire reputation will suffer, and you'll lose credibility.īut monitoring the health and performance of your website isn't just important for small businesses experiencing their first rush of traffic - it's even more important for well-established companies that want to satisfy their existing user base. Monitoring your website is an important step in ensuring that you retain your existing customers and attract new users. Why Website Monitoring Tools are Important In this article, we'll discuss the benefits of website monitoring, and introduce you to the different types of monitoring tools that are available. For example, there are simple tools that will alert you when your website is unreachable, and there are more complex tools that can alert you when specific services are seeing abnormally high latency. This is where website monitoring tools can help.ĭepending on how complicated your monitoring needs are, there are many different services available that can help you monitor your website and web applications at various levels of granularity. If you've gone through the effort of creating a website for your business, and you've created original, engaging content to attract new customers, you'll want to make sure that your website loads quickly for users, and is always accessible (i.e.

Website monitor software