Monitoring

Website monitoring

Monitoring is essential to ensure that a website is available to users, downtime is minimized, and performance can be optimized. Users that rely on a website or an application for work or pleasure will get frustrated or even stop using the application if it is not reliably available.^[2] Monitoring can cover many things that an application needs to function, like network connectivity, Domain Name System records, database connectivity, bandwidth, and computer resources like free RAM, CPU load, disk space, events, etc. Commonly measured metrics are response time and availability (or uptime), but consistency and reliability metrics are gaining popularity. Measuring a website's availability and reliability under various amounts of traffic is often referred to as load testing.

Website monitoring also helps benchmark the website against the performance of a competitor to help determine how well a site is performing. Website speed is also used as a metric for search engine rankings.^[3]

Website monitoring can be used to hold web hosting providers accountable for their service-level agreements. Most web hosts offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and when uptime is less than that, individuals can be refunded for the excessive downtime. Note that not all hosts will refund individuals for excessive downtime so one must become familiar with the terms of service of their host

System monitoring

Software monitors occur more commonly, sometimes as a part of a widget engine. These monitoring systems are often used to keep track of system resources, such as CPU usage and frequency, or the amount of free RAM. They are also used to display items such as free space on one or more hard drives, the temperature of the CPU and other important components,^[2] and networking information including the system IP address and current rates of upload and download. Other possible displays may include the date and time, system uptime, computer name, username, hard drive S.M.A.R.T. data, fan speeds, and the voltages being provided by the power supply