Web Site Monitoring

Dotcom-Monitor^® works to keep you informed about your web site's availability, performance and content - that means your web sites and applications keep running, and are more profitable.

How does our web site monitoring work?

Dotcom-Monitor^® has remote agents positioned around the globe that act like an Internet browser. Once you create an account with us and submit URLs you would like to monitor, the process starts immediately. Our agents will start checking your site with the frequency that you've set up. The agents monitor your web site to insure the web site is accessible, has proper content, and is maintaining good performance. If any of these things fall outside specified parameters, the notification process starts.

• Accessibility & Availability Check

  Web Site Accessibility Monitoring insures that your web site is accessible from multiple locations around the world. If the web site is not accessible, we take a traceroute snapshot and record it along with an error message.

• Performance Check

  Web Site Performance Monitoring checks the time it takes for your server to respond to the monitoring agent's request. You can specify the threshold, for example, 5 seconds. This is the time that you expect your page to load on the client browser. If, for example, your page takes over 5 seconds to load, we will notify you about possible performance issues with your server.

• Content Check

  Each time we check your site, we look for a specific phrase or keyword that you've set-up. Web Site Content Monitoring ensures that your page was not altered without your knowledge and that the page has the proper content. This feature is especially useful for insuring your data is valid on database-driven web sites. If a keyword is not present on that web page we take a snapshot of that web page, store it in the database for your review, and start the notification process.

• Form Submission

  Web Site Form Monitoring allows you to insure that your forms work correctly. Specifically, Dotcom-Monitor^® performs HTTP POST requests and analyzes the results.

• Secure Sites

  Web Site Security Monitoring allows you to monitor password-protected sites.

• Server Digital Certificates

  Digital Certificate Monitoring allows you to monitor the validity of your digital SSL certificate. We verify certificate Authority, Common Name, Date, and Revocation Certificate Usage. This feature is important for any company that uses SSL.

• Client Digital Certificate

  If you have applications that require a client-side certificate as an authentication mechanism, Dotcom-Monitor^® can install your certificate on the monitoring agent to allow monitoring of your secure site.

• Cookie Support

  Cookies are a general mechanism by which server-side connections can both store and retrieve information on the client side of the connection. The addition of a simple, persistent, client-side state significantly extends the capabilities of Web-based client/server applications. Dotcom-Monitor^® agents provide complete cookie support.

• Full-page Download

  The HTTP and HTTPS monitoring processes only download the HTML returned by the server in response to a GET or POST request.

  However, when the Full-page Download tool is enabled the returned HTML is parsed. Then the parsed elements within the HTML, such as, images, style sheets, applets etc., also are downloaded.

  This monitoring approach is similar to a regular browser page download and rendering process.

  The full page download option is useful monitoring for:

  • referenced elements within HTML-images, style sheets, applets, etc...
  • and ensuring that nothing is missing on the page,
  • and ensuring that there are no slow elements present on the page that may slow down the end user's browsing experience.

  Many organizations use the full page download service for monitoring pages that have third-party images or other elements referenced in it. If a third party server is slow or unavailable the Full-page Download tool will detect this problem. The Full-page Download tool is a specialized additional service that needs to be enabled by contacting Dotcom-Monitor^® customer service.