Review of the Best Website Monitoring Tools and Services:
When I open a website, I want it to run fast that too without any breaks. If what I expect is not available or if it has uptime with poor quality then I instantly switch to another website.
And end up finishing my task like looking for information, placing orders, etc. with the one that works better. Thereafter, I shall give priority to the one I used with a better experience. Just like me, many others follow the same logic and such customers do not go back to the websites with poor speed or downtime.
Thus, the customer’s experience is directly proportional to the business of the websites. Customers with bad experiences bring loss to the business.
Hence nowadays, the owners of company websites have started giving more importance to the stability and constant availability/uptime of the websites. For this purpose, each organization uses different uptime testing tools to monitor their full-time accessibility and website unavailability to the customers.
The current market has many such uptime testing tools. Most of which are free of cost. By using such tools one can get notified as and when the URL goes down or when the website is unavailable.
Using such uptime testing tools is always reasonable than making a manual team continuously monitor the screen for downtime issues. In this article, we will take a look at the most popular Uptime Testing Tools that are available in the market along with their key features.
Table of Contents:
Best Website Monitoring Tools and Services
Given below are some popular open-source free website monitor service:
#1) Site24x7
Site24x7 is an easy to use, yet powerful tool that helps you monitor a website’s uptime and performance.
It offers a free version that allows you to monitor upto 5 websites at a time as well as receive upto 10 SMS/Call alerts per month(Email alerts are free). Paid versions start from $9 per month for monitoring 10 websites from 8 different test locations. You can also receive upto 50 SMS/Call alerts per month in this pack.
Key Features:
- Monitors your website’s uptime and performance from over 110+ locations worldwide.
- Offers full-stack monitoring with features such as Transaction Monitoring, Network Monitoring, Application Monitoring, and Server monitoring.
- It also provides monitoring for Critical Cloud-based applications and identifies different errors.
- Supports many protocols like HTTPS, HTTP, TCP, PING, DNS, etc.
- Provides integration with services such as Zapier and Pager Duty for notifications.
- The plan also includes verification of checks and alerts.
- It also provides root cause analysis reports for outages and server issues.
#2) eG Innovations
eG Innovations is converged application performance and IT infrastructure monitoring solution that is intended to answer the toughest question facing IT administrators today, which is “why is my application slow?”.
Using synthetic and real user monitoring capabilities, it tracks the digital experience of applications 24×7. Detailed code-level insights using tag-and-follow byte-code instrumentation helps identify application code inefficiencies, slow queries, third-party slowness, etc.
eG Enterprise monitors every layer and every tier of the infrastructure supporting business applications, using a universal monitoring technology. Everything from hardware to storage to virtualization to containers is monitored from a single pane of glass.
It provides exceptional accuracy when automatically pinpointing the cause of IT service slowdowns, using an automated root-cause diagnosis technology. It auto-correlates the user experience with the underlying infrastructure and application components and makes application performance monitoring easy, effective, and efficient.
Key Features:
- Monitor any type of application (web, thin client, SAP, SaaS applications) and any infrastructure (physical, virtual, hybrid, cloud).
- Monitors all aspects of digital user experience for web applications and provides insights for rapid triage of problems.
- It provides application code-level visibility that will help developers to detect and fix performance issues if any, and ensure an optimal end-user experience.
- End-to-end visibility and automated diagnosis simplify application performance troubleshooting.
#3) ManageEngine Applications Manager
With Applications Manager, you get a tool that grants you total visibility and performance of your business’s critical applications.
It detects and isolates performance issues so they can be fixed by IT admins before any further harm is caused. The software is ideal for optimizing the DevOps process while also ensuring an excellent end-user experience.
Features:
- Trouble application issues in Dev, production, and QA environments.
- Test the performance of critical user paths on your website round the clock for better customer experience.
- Get in-depth information on the network, front end, and backend response times.
- Identify and resolve database issues.
- Gain total visibility into hybrid, private, and public cloud resources.
#4) Sematext
Sematext is an all-in-one website monitoring solution that provides end-to-end visibility and observability. When it comes to website monitoring, we offer Sematext Experience, our real user monitoring (RUM) solution, and Synthetics, our synthetic monitoring tool.
With Sematext Experience, you’ll get a report on the actual experience and satisfaction of your users while providing key pieces of information as to how your website or application is performing in different locations, devices, or different connection speeds.
Every plan has a risk-free, 14-day trial that does not require any credit card to be added. We also offer granular control over what you pay for as every product is individually priced. This way you can pay only for the products and features he needs.
Features:
- A unified location for all your logs, metrics, and events.
- Identify resources & requests with the biggest negative impact on your website performance.
- Real-time alerts and debugging solutions.
- Support for all major frameworks.
- Very well documented features.
#5) AlertBot
AlertBot has been offering advanced website application monitoring done simply for more than 15 years. Companies choose AlertBot to help them find and eliminate website problems, increase revenue and protect their online image. AlertBot helps companies ensure a first-class website experience for all their customers.
Key Features:
- A simple and intuitive interface that makes it effortless to set up and monitor your most advanced websites and web applications.
- Test crucial web pages and mobile pages using real web browsers.
- It uses fast alerting to help keep users informed and on top of things by alerting your team anytime your website is slow or down with text message, email, or phone call alerts.
- AlertBot’s team works alongside you to make sure all your pages and recorded processes are running smoothly.
- It offers a Proactive ScriptAssist option to help proactively address and fix issues for your recorded experiences to save your team a lot of time.
- Monitor your web pages and processes from over 100 locations around the world.
#6) Pingdom
Pingdom offers free monitoring of the website. Its free monitoring is limited to one website only and requires credit card information too. This tool is very popular in paid monitoring services and is used by many big organizations.
Its presentation of reports as the public status page is very reliable and beautiful too. Minimally, it costs $14.95 for the uptime checking of websites or servers.
Key Features:
- It provides more than 60 locations for monitoring a website.
- It takes care of alerts via email or SMS and of website testing too.
- It includes monitoring of page speed.
- It also offers additional features that might not be available in other uptime tools.
#7) SiteUptime
SiteUPtime is an open-source tool with the limitation of one website uptime testing for 30-60 minutes. A user can validate for eight different locations across five continents.
For paid plans, it provides some other additional services as well.
Key Features:
- It validates the uptime testing status with instant reports.
- It monitors – HTTPS, SSL, Web Page content, DNS, POP3, SMPT, TCP Ports, FTP, and pings.
- A user can configure email or alert triggers for getting 1-5 errors.
- A user can get emails or alerts when the website is up again.
- The detailed reports of all failures and monthly logs are available to the user to browse through an account control panel.
#8) Monitis
Monitis is one of the popular and multiple service provider tools. It is used by many big organizations like Siemens, Puma, etc. Monitor.us uptime testing tool is another most popular and trusted tool used by business giants like eBay, ADOBE, etc.
It is now merged with Monitis. It gives a 15-day trial option with unlimited monitoring. The cost of paid plans depends upon the number of monitors and monitoring locations.
Key Features:
- It is used to monitor websites, networks, applications, servers, cloud, etc with a root cause analysis.
- It allows more than 30 locations across the globe to monitor uptime.
- Detailed reporting is available in the form of email alerts and SMS.
- Multiple protocols can be used like HTTP, PING, HTTPS, DNS, POP3, IMAP, TCP, etc.
- It provides interval checks of 1 minute.
- It also provides an archive of the last 2 years’ performance.
#9) Montastic
Montastic is a quite old, but very user-friendly and an open-source uptime testing tool. This tool validates the availability or the uptime of the website and acknowledges the same by sending warnings of the website crashes via RSS or e-mail.
A user can monitor 3 websites with the free option with 30 min check intervals.
Key Features:
- A user can monitor 15-200 websites with 5 min check intervals from a paid account.
- Most of its check locations are from the US for open source. For paid users, they provide additional locations worldwide.
- It supports HTTPS, HTTP, and an end-user interface.
- It acknowledges uptime as well as downtime in the reports.
- They have their windows or Mac widgets to send messages or warnings, apart from sending them via emails or RSS.
- Paid plans are also available from $5 to $29 with some additional features.
- It has a REST developer API.
#10) UptimeRobot
UptimeRobot is another popular uptime testing open-source tool. It allows a user with a free account to monitor 50 sites with 5 min intervals and a two months log. It keeps checking the code in the header of the website and warns with the message on finding any problem.
Key Features:
- Like other uptime testing tools, it also provides paid services at $5.50 per month with some additional features.
- A user can validate uptime, downtime and response time too.
- It checks HTTP, HTTPS, port, ping, and keywords.
- It provides a user with 12 different locations for monitoring.
- It allows a user to ignore minor level downtimes by specific settings.
- The methods for sending alerts are E-mail, RSS, Twitter, Slack, Push, Hipch, SMS, etc.
#11) HostTracker
HostTracker is a very strong uptime testing tool. It works great for alerting and tracking during downtime. Many popular companies like Colgate, Microsoft, Panasonic, etc are using this tool.
With its free plan, a user can monitor 2 websites in every 30 minutes. Paid plans come with enhanced features and unlimited alerts.
Key Features:
- Two different websites can be monitored in two different domains.
- The reports are available on a yearly, quarterly, monthly and weekly basis.
- Issues are informed via e-mail or SMS.
- The protocols which are supported are HTTP, HTTPS, ping, AMTP, port, Oracle, POP3, MS SQL, etc.
- Its paid plan starts with $3.35 per month for 5 websites.
- A user can track useful data and get distributed monitoring.
#12) Are My Sites Up?
Are My Sites Up? is also an open-source web tool for uptime testing of websites. The user with the free account of a 15 day trial period can test 5 different websites, 25 TIMES A DAY, for uptime and receive email/SMS alerts on poor performance.
Key Features:
- The free account can be shared with two or more users to monitor the website uptime.
- The minimum paid plan starts from $2.92 per month with some additional features.
- The tool provides access to iPhone and Android applications to view, delete, add or edit all the websites in the account.
- The check time is 1 min for a free account and 5-15 min for paid accounts.
#13) FreeSiteStatus
FreeSiteStatus is a web-based uptime testing application. This tool is very reliable and fast.
The free account is available with 60 min monitoring for a 14-day trial but with limited features.
Key Features:
- The application has a feature of ‘Quick Test’ for instant monitoring of website performance.
- The paid account costs $2.0 per month for monitoring and $.25 per SMS.
- It supports protocols like HTTP, HTTPS. POP3, FTP, My SQL, etc.
- It sends alerts via email, SMS, and Push.
- Multiple locations worldwide are available for monitoring websites.
- Reports and performances are represented in a graphical format for better understanding.
#14) Uptrends
Uptrends is one of the most popular website/web applications uptime testing tools. The tool provides uptime information, to the website users, all the time.
The free trial of 30 days is available for this tool with limited features. In which it allows 10 websites monitoring with 1-60 min checks at worldwide locations.
Key Features:
- Its free trial is available with no credit card details.
- More than 150 worldwide checkpoints are available for monitoring with this tool.
- Its paid plan starts from $11 per month.
- Multi-Browser monitoring is available in its Advanced Business plan. Which includes waterfall report, third-party content and mobile web monitoring.
- The reports or alerts are sent by email or SMS.
#15) Solarwinds Web Performance Monitor
Solarwinds Web Performance Monitor can find and fix internal as well as external site and app performance issues. It will perform complete performance monitoring and continuous synthetic transaction monitoring. It will give you detailed load-time metrics.
Further reading =>> Top tools for Synthetic Transaction Monitoring
Key Features:
- Web Performance Monitor provides an intuitive, browser-based transaction recorder that can record complex, multi-step transactions.
- It can monitor a lot of applications from multiple locations.
- It provides an intuitive dashboard so that you will be able to quickly see and troubleshoot issues.
- You can track sites and apps that are inside or outside your firewall.
- It will let you generate out-of-the-box and custom website performance reports for page load speeds, transaction health, website uptime, etc.
- It follows a simple pricing model i.e. based on the number of monitored transactions and locations. The price starts at $2055 and it offers a free trial.
#16) Dotcom-Monitor
Dotcom-Monitor all-in-one monitoring solution makes it easy to ensure uptime, performance, and availability of your websites and web applications on a global scale.
Web Page Monitoring: Monitor page load times from around the globe in real desktop and mobile browsers. Identify page load performance issues and resolve them quickly for an exceptional user experience.
Web Page Monitoring Highlights:
- Real browser monitoring
- Ensure consistent experience
- Web Page Insights
- DOM element timing
Web Application Monitoring: The most simple and reliable way to monitor web application performance. Quickly and easily create scripts in real browsers that emulate real user interactions and transactions with your application.
Web Application Monitoring Highlights:
- Synthetic monitoring
- Point and click scripting tool
- Video capture and playback
- Supports Rich Internet Applications
#17) Uptime Doctor
By using the Uptime Doctor tool, for uptime testing, a user can test 5 websites with a 1 min interval, at a free of cost.
The alerts will be sent via email or push messages on android as per the user’s choice.
#18) AppBeat
AppBeat uptime testing tool has paid as well as a free plan in it.
Under the free plan, a user can monitor 50 sites at 5 min intervals and get the reports in 100 emails.
#19) InternetSeer
InternetSeer is considered to be the uptime testing tool with the largest monitoring websites in the world.
It has a standard plan as a free trial for one website at 60 min checks.
#20) Status Cake
Status Cake also provides a free plan apart from the paid ones.
Its paid plans start from $24.49. This paid plan has slower intervals, limited test locations and missing advanced monitoring features in it.
#21) Observu
Observu is a very simple uptime testing tool with free as well as paid plans.
A user can monitor 5 to 50 plus websites and APIs by automatically using multiple locations worldwide.
#22) Livewatch
Livewatch uptime testing tool is a free and simple web to monitor the website instantly.
Rest other plans are paid ones and it provides proper PDF reports of any failures or downtimes that occur.
#23) UPTIMIA
The UPTIMIA uptime testing tool also provides a free account.
It monitors the availability of HTTPS, HTTP, DNS, TCP, UDP, Email services and others along with the website performance with a real chrome browser.
#24) Insping
Insping is one of the simplest uptime testing and performance monitoring tool.
Its free plan includes two URLs, in 5 min intervals, with two users and floating locations.
#25) Binary Canary
Binary Canary uptime testing tool with a free account monitors 5 websites with 15 min frequency, from multiple locations.
While the paid plan starts with $5 per month and can monitor 5 to 100 websites with 1-minute frequency, from global locations.
#26) idera.com
ideara.com uptime testing tool is good for SQL server performance monitoring 24/7 from anywhere.
#27) Happy Apps
Happy Apps is a good performance and uptime testing tool.
It provides a large number of checks in a few seconds with an easy setup of alerts via email and SMS.
Conclusion
By using the above-mentioned Website Monitoring Services, anyone can save their business beforehand. Once the user gets the alerts of the downtime or other issues, they can instantly resolve the issue before it’s too late.
Apart from the above popular tools, there are some more uptime testing tools around. You just need to explore the one which suits best and reasonable for your website.