Recommended Website Monitoring Tools

[James77]

Hi,

I was wondering what people would recommend for website monitoring (IE is my website working as it should!).

I need something that will:
1/. Allow multiple page monitoring not just homepage
2/. Do header status checking
3/. Do page content checking (ie if the page changes massively, or include the word "error") then we have an issue!
4/. Multiple alert possibilities.

We currently use www.websitepulse.com and it is a good service that does all the above, however it just seems so overly complex that its hard to understand what is going on, and its complex functionality and features are really a negative in our case.

Thanks

[James77]

Doing some digging I found a useful list:

http://mashable.com/2010/04/09/free-uptime-monitoring/

Anyone have any feedback/reviews on these specific tools?

[RobertFisher]

It seems you are looking for something that constantly monitors the site and simply alerts you to problems. From my point of view as an agency that has more than a few sites up, it might be overkill and I am not sure of what it would be. What we do to cover what you are listing is this: We have a pro plus moz membership and do campaign tracking with it. We can see on a weekly basis via email and daily if we just log in: 4xx, 5xx errors, dupe pg titles, missing pg titles, blocked bots, etc. as well as on page SEO issues, and general robots, rel - canon, etc.

For content checking of page changes I am at a loss, error reports as above and server downtime as below (mon.itor.us) with good result. The beauty of the SEOmoz campaign for me is that it also tracks rankings, connects to G Analytics, and provides competitive link analysis DA, PA, etc.

For the Headers you can use Screaming Frog (I just love that name and it works).

Hope that helps.

[RobertFisher]

Mon.itor.us works well and is free.

[James77]

Hi Rob,

Essentially we have a pretty complex website, with many different sections. This website is constantly being developed so there will probably be code releases for changes maybe 4-5 times per week. Any one of these changes may end up causing an issue with one of the pages (IE page of a specific type) . In addition to this we can get issues with DB or server memory which can occasional cause the website to fail.

All issues are pretty disastrous for business, so what I need to know (or to be more exact our developers need to know) as soon as an issue occurs (most of the attached services will check down all you to set a checking period of say every 5 mins) so it can be fixed (as opposed to waiting for a customer etc to tell us there is a website issue, or manually checking every page type with every code release).

As I say we do have websitepulse at the moment which is great, but also far to complex etc to easy set up and manage, so just doing research around this area, and seeing if anyone has some advice.

Thanks

[James77]

PS - I had a look at Mon.itor.us - have you tried their paid service: http://portal.monitis.com/ ??

[RobertFisher]

Have not, but based on the service for free, it is likely worth a try given it is more robust. With most of our sites we do not have the level of complexity so it is less of a need. Hopefully, some of the mozzers with more eCommerce will see and respond. Also, if you have a private question available, you might use that to go straight to moz and see what they could suggest.

[X-com]

We use Pingdom to monitor a lot of client websites. It is great, because we receive SMS messages when something is wrong. The detailed reporting, iPhone app and abilty to monitor http-statuses is exceptional!

http://www.pingdom.com/