A website isn't just a single site. It is a group of servers that are sometimes spread out all over the world. Tools for monitoring the performance of a network from a distance make sure that all network applications are working.
In the real world, there are all kinds of businesses, from small ones like mine to huge ones like Wal-Mart.
On the Internet, businesses come in all shapes and sizes, from a stand-alone page for selling ebooks, where the webmaster and owner are the same person, to a 300-pound gorilla like Amazon, which has more than a million pages and needs the entire population of a small country to serve as webmasters.
Your site is its own network if it only has one page. But if your site is bigger than that and you want it to grow, it is either already a network or is on its way to becoming one. You need monitoring of the network.
Most ecommerce webmasters know at least a little bit about monitoring websites. Many people use a service or software to keep track of the "uptime" and "downtime" of their websites.
At your local shopping mall, you need to know more than when the front doors are open and closed to do serious business. Ecommerce that is taken seriously needs to know more than just when the site is open. That is the whole point of network monitoring.
What Does Network Monitoring Check?/center>
Your e-business probably owns or remotely uses at least one of the following:
DNS servers: These are used to turn your site name, like www.URL.com, into numbers that computers can understand, called "IP addresses." If DNS servers aren't working right, users won't be able to find your site and will get an error message instead. Most of the time, this kind of problem can only be found by an outside or remote monitoring service.
An FTP server: File Transfer Protocol servers help you send and receive files.
share files with users far away. Using FTP, a monitoring
service can keep it up and running all the time.
SMTP and POP3 servers: People use these to send and receive emails. If you use email, it's likely that you use SMTP and POP3. If your SMTP server is down, everyone who sends you an email will get an error message saying that your mail server is down and can't accept new emails. It would be an understatement to say that this makes your customers think badly of you. If your POP3 server goes down, you won't be able to get your email from your mailbox. Again, this kind of problem can only be stopped by outside monitoring.
Firewalls: Firewalls are used by a lot of businesses to protect their internal networks from things like spyware, viruses, and sabotage by competitors. Also, a firewall is the first thing you do to protect yourself. If your firewall goes down, people outside your network may not be able to get into it at all. In other words, if you host your own website and mail servers, they will become
If your firewall goes down, the outside world won't be able to get in. Again, remote network monitoring is needed to find out that there is a problem and fix it quickly.
Internet connections: Users connect to your network through different backbones, depending on where they are and what company they use to connect to the Internet. It's important to make sure that everyone can use your connection well. A remote monitoring service can ping your networks from multiple places around the world, testing the most important routes to your web server or network. Before you hire a network monitoring service, make sure they know both where your customers are and how the Internet works.
Few websites, no matter how big or how many features they have, are anything but a full network, and many networks depend on servers in different parts of the world.
A good network monitoring service can make sure, as a starting point, that all servers are working properly, that data can be sent to and received from each server, and that each function that shares the server responds as needed. A sophisticated network monitoring service can even check the temperature of your servers from afar.
How big your network is will determine what you need to keep an eye on. A professional in network monitoring can help you figure out what needs to be watched. If you own the servers or are hosted remotely on dedicated servers, it's likely that you need to keep an eye on everything. If your site is hosted on a server that is shared with other sites, you may need to monitor fewer functions.
