In a nutshell, Dotcom-Monitor is doing one simple thing – trying to reach your website from different geographic locations at specified intervals and notify you of any issues. As simple as that! Well, in reality, you have a lot more control over this process. You can choose between different geographic locations, types of issues you want to be notified, ways to receive those notifications, etc.

In this article, we will look into more details of “Dotcom-Monitor trying to reach your website” and different ways this could be done.

There are plenty of web monitoring types you may use in order to ensure website performance. Dotcom-Monitor provides a comprehensive set of tools to implement all types of web monitoring. Monitoring types can be combined to cover all sophisticated monitoring goals.

This article guides you in picking the right monitoring type and the related Dotcom-Monitor device type.

COMPREHENSIVE WEB APPs FUNCTIONALITY MONITORING

To perform a comprehensive check of a web application, not only do you need to test web application availability for end-users and webpage object issues (slow loading JavaScript elements, third-party API issues), but you also have to be sure all user transactions are processed successfully. For example, if you were to test a page that included an online form, but did not fill in the form or click-through any additional actions, you can’t be sure the form submits the data properly and a user can actually use it.

Functionality or transaction monitoring allows you to script and record the critical steps, paths, or business tasks you expect your end users to complete. For example, you can record logging into a site, executing site searches, submitting forms, or walking through the online purchasing process in a real browser.

Dotcom-Monitor provides customers with the EveryStep Web Recorder, a macro recorder that can automatically record these steps in a browser through point-and-click scripting. Running the script opens web pages in a browser and interacts with a web application in the same way as a regular end-user would. In the case of network and server errors, web page element loading issues, or transaction step failures, an alert will be triggered.

To start functionality monitoring, set up a Web Application Monitoring (UserView) device.

WEB PAGE PERFORMANCE MONITORING

Dotcom-Monitor provides you with the tool to test a single URL, such as a landing page for connection speeds and browser load times. If you need to track changes in SEO score before and after improvements, you can use the tool to pull Lighthouse reports and monitor changes in a specific web page performance metric.


  • Web Page Test in Real Browser


  • SEO Score Monitoring


WEB SERVICES AVAILABILITY MONITORING

The basic way to make sure web services, domains, or a single page are accessible for users, is availability or uptime monitoring. In other words, if the goal is to monitor if your users can enter a specific URL, and do not receive any type of page errors, such as “Error 404: Page not found” but reach the address, this type of monitoring is the ideal method.

Dotcom-Monitor will check if the target web resource is responding without downloading the content into a browser – only the presence of the resource response is considered. Depending on your needs and the target resource type, you may perform SSL certificates validity as well as basic authorization features. If Dotcom-Monitor does not receive a response from the target URL, the site will be considered down and the corresponding alert will be triggered.


  • Websites and APIs Availability and Performance: HTTP(S), SOAP, WebSocket, Postman Collection

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  • Server Port Availability


  • IP-connection Monitoring


INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE MONITORING

Usually, a web resource comes with a number of other web services or infrastructure elements such as API software, mail servers, FTP services, etc., that also can be tasted with the Dotcom-Monitor tools.


  • FTP(S)/SFTP Server Uptime and Availability

  • Mail Server Monitoring


  • Video Streaming Monitoring


  • VoIP-SIP Monitoring


  • DNS: Monitoring of Domain Name Resolution and Presence on DNS Blacklists


RESOURCE MONITORING

At some point, hardware resources might be critical for your server performance to prevent any hardware-side issues before they affect your website or application. Monitoring of hardware performance counters allows keeping track of resources of web servers or devices connected to the Internet (CPU load, memory usage statistics, disk space, bandwidth saturation, and more).

In combination with web performance monitoring, resource monitoring allows correlating the results for comprehensive analysis. For example, by monitoring back-end server resources, you can correlate CPU temperature and disk I/O with the speed of a shopping cart in your mobile application.

Dotcom-Monitor MetricsView services support Linux, Windows, Custom Performance Counters,  as well as other devices not connected to the Internet.


  • Windows Server


  • Linux Server


  • SNMP Capable Devices


  • Custom Metrics