Does your company have a solid internet presence for advertisement? Does your company carry out any form of business activity across the World Wide Web? Does your company store its crucial data on separate safeguarded servers? Do your employees need the internet for doing their work? If the answer for any of these questions is 'yes' then web monitoring is indispensible for you.

Web monitoring involves the use of several specific network based skills. Such skills are hard to find even in the most skilled IT workers. This is why outsourcing is the only viable option in this case. Besides a web presence, these services are also essential for handling the database servers of the organization. This is why it is further subdivided into two subcategories - Server Monitoring and Website Monitoring.

Web Monitoring Types: Server Monitoring

Imagine a scenario where an intruder bombards your website with hundreds of queries within a very short span of time. This will cause your server to go in the denial of service mode and all your web services will go down. If you happen to be using a shared hosting service, then the chances of such a situation arising will increase with an increase in the number of websites being handled by the server. What do you expect to do in such a situation?

Web servers are the driving force behind your website. However, despite all the effort to the contrary, these devices are highly susceptible to crashes. This is why constant vigilance is required while monitoring their functioning. This task is known as server monitoring.

You certainly are not expected to keep visiting your website every hour, day and night, to check its status. This is why most organizations prefer outsourcing such services. Following are some of the commonly offered services in this category:

• Regularly conduct checks on the server for its status and efficiency.

• Send out notification mails, SMS, etc in case of a failure.

• Carry out checks on the server from a visitor's perspective and from multiple locations.

• Provide an interactive tool to the server owner to carry out remote checks.

For example, one leading server management firm in the UK follows the following steps in case of any fault with the server:

• It confirms the fault from at least two separate locations

• Upon confirmations, it sends out warning SMSes to the concerned organization

• Updates the API with the error record

• It keeps on resending the SMS after every 5 minutes if the error remains unresolved

Web Monitoring Types: Website Monitoring

Website monitoring does to websites what server monitoring does to servers. This monitoring service is carried out on a per URL basis. For example, you could get a standard package for 12 months of monitoring a single URL every 10 minutes. On the other hand, a 2 URL monitor can be hired for the same period of 12 months with the URLs checked every 5 minutes. The advantage here is that each URL will be checked twice as many times a day.

These website monitoring packages can also be used to get the frequency of visitors to each URL. This way you can focus on enhancing the most demanding sectors, while upgrading the least visited pages. These monitors are generally placed at multiple locations, geographically. This way you can get to know which server is faulty based on the location from where the alert is sounded. These tests are carried out on the domain name servers (DNS), HTTP status of the URL and the page content. Some of the common forms of error handled in this case are:

• Decline in the quality of service

• Identification of a predefined content pattern

• Thresholds are exceeded

• Web server fails to provide results