Web monitoring is performed inside and outside the firewall that businesses and people use. Some companies/organizations focus on internal and some on external web monitoring.
Third-party website monitoring takes care of the site both internally and externally. Both the types are mentioned below in this article.
Internal web monitoring:
Internal web monitoring from your data center with the help of your own web server. For this, there are some tools available. This may not work sometimes. The tools here send a request to the web server through which, they respond whether the system is up and able to run, and if it is not running, it shows that there are issues and they should be fixed. In advanced monitoring, it will measure the time for receiving the response. The major advantage with this type of simple tools is they are free and low-priced and their major disadvantage is the website that are modern consists of more different no. of components in which each one is having their own characteristics i.e., if you need to monitor all the components which have different characteristics, you need to understand everything clearly and their roles. Even though there is continuous monitoring, you won’t have an idea whether your services are really helping clients.
There is a second group of tools. These tools are more sophisticated and they monitor your website from clients’ perspective. These tools automatically will hit all web server components and the information that you receive will have everything as long as it is inside your firewall so that the information you receive will be easy to understand. This type of monitoring is important because it doesn’t have delays caused by the Internet, bead peer agreements etc. Internal monitoring is very useful as starting point and is a standard part of many hosting providers.
External web monitoring:
External monitoring uses third-party tools that run outside your web server to provide you with information regarding the performance and availability of the website. This is capable of monitoring infrastructure, including the Internet and ISP’s that host agents. It can’t replace the internal monitoring, but is a complementary.
Internal monitoring can’t provide the information regarding the quality of service the client is receiving and it cannot tell you whether the client is able to execute transactions and they don’t focus on end-end applications.
External monitoring is not monitoring the traffic as internal monitoring. As monitoring is internal driven the measurements here are taken every hour, quarter or half hour. As website is monitored by different agents, this will provide granular data.
External monitoring is of three different types. Monitoring from proprietary agents, software and hardware components managed and owned by the vendor, monitoring by cloud based agents involve only software managed by vendors, and the last is desktop monitoring where the software probes are installed on a system through, in which owners get a small fee. And, these vendors usually offer more agents in many different places. This type of monitoring is hired by businesses, mostly other than IT departments, which do internal monitoring themselves.