siteGuardian | Why Site Guardian?

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Why Monitor?

Why Site Guardian?

Product Features

Online Monitoring

Performance Monitoring

Notification Services

Why is Site Guardian different than other Internet monitoring services?

Let's break them down into several categories.

Monitor Setup

If you want to set up monitoring for a URL, there's just one easy step: enter the URL.

If you want to set up monitoring for more complex URLs, we provide additional options. Each monitor can be setup to send cookies and referee URLs. While monitoring, you can have the request simulate a certain browser type. You can monitor realm-protected URLs. All monitors can have their content (HTML) verified and checked against a user defined keyword or phrase (Boolean operations allowed).

If you are monitoring a form or application that requires input, you can set up data to be sent to the form automatically. This ensures your forms and applications are working correctly. Again, keywords or phrases can be set up to match the returned response.

Secure Server monitoring (SSL) can be used to monitor secure URLs (https). All options above apply to secure monitoring, also.

DNS monitoring can be configured to lookup the IP address of your domain, using your own DNS servers (primary and secondary DNS servers are allowed). If we can't reach the DNS servers or don't get an IP back, you have the option to treat it as an error and alert you.

Data Analysis, Trending, and Reporting

The following information is gathered during each check of the monitor: date, time, download time of the HTML, download time of all elements of the page (images, applets, etc.), bytes downloaded and response code.

When errors occur, a second request is made to the site to make sure it was a real error and not some Internet "anomaly". If the second request fails, a traceroute and ping of the site is performed. A traceroute and ping is done every twenty-four hours during normal operations. This provides the ideal results, to which the results during times of problems can be compared. This gives you a good/bad picture of the network during normal times and failure time. This comparison of results indicates any network problems.

Each request for each monitor is logged into a database for analysis and reporting. Reports are generated in real-time, which enables you to see up-to-the-minute summary reports. Reports for each monitor give several pieces of information. You specify a date range and a monitor and we'll show a graph of performance over time of each request, performance of each hour during the date range (this lets you know your heaviest hours during the day), performance of each weekday during the date range (this lets you know your heaviest days during the week). Also summarized during the time period is the response time, slow responses, failed responses, heaviest hours, top slow times, top failing times. Advanced accounts can select multiple monitors and graph them together. This will visually show how one monitor compares against another, maybe you against your competitor.

A calendar view can also be generated that shows the response time, max time, min time, slow and failed responses for each day of the month.

These reports can also point out capacity issues or performance problems. Let's say you notice from 10 AM-2 PM every weekday that your response time goes from 3 seconds to 10 seconds. You might want to look at your systems to make sure you are not running jobs on the machine during peak business hours. Maybe your machine needs to be upgraded, or your network is saturated with traffic.

All selected data can be downloaded into a spreadsheet of your choice for further analysis and reporting.

Slow Responses and Error Notifications

For each monitor you set up, you have complete control over how quickly you are alerted to problems. First, you set the minimum threshold for how long you think it should take to download your page. Anything over this threshold is treated as a slow response. You can set up each monitor to alert you after a selected number of concurrent slow responses.

Also, you set the threshold for failures that may occur. A failure could include not being able to get to your machine to monitor it, DNS problems, keyword matching problems, broken images, or server errors. Again, you can set up each monitor to alert you after a selected number of concurrent failures.

Both slow responses and failures for a monitor can be configured to go to different contacts. If the alert is a slow response, then the contents of the alert contains the breakdown of all elements downloaded and the response time for each element. For failures, the alert contains the response of each failure, traceroute/ping results of the last known success, and the current.

You are able to configure each monitor to suspend notifications after a specified number of alerts. You can also configure each monitor to stop repeated alerts when you are already aware of the problem. A confirmation notice can be sent to notify contacts of when the monitor is back to normal. Notification exceptions can be set up for each monitor to disallow alerts during scheduled outages.

Remote Administration

Site Guardian has invested tremendous resources into the administration of your account. If you are an individual wanting to perform simple monitoring or a business wanting to gather trending data for capacity planning, we have built very intuitive and flexible screens to help manage your account. All screens have online help for further explanation.

One of our most popular features is the task of grouping similar monitors together. Say you want to monitor a few pages of your web site and a few web pages of another web site simultaneously. This is accomplished by establishing multiple groups. You can make two groups with similar monitors under one group and the other monitors under another group. You can specify as many groups as you like. Within each group you can arrange them in any order. These groupings become your default view for summaries and reports.

Another feature is the setup of multiple contacts. You can have as many contacts as you want for alert notifications and reports. Each monitor can be configured to have different contacts for both slow responses and failures. These contacts can have a preference on the format of any report/alert. Currently we support HTML e-mail, plain text e-mail, and pager e-mail. Each contact can be turned off at a global level for vacations or other situations without having to turn them off for each monitor. The same goes for daily and monthly reports.

Advanced scheduling was built in to provide you with the most flexible scheduling of monitoring for your sites. You can set up scheduling to monitor 24 x 7, or monitor any day of the week, any time of the day. Schedules can also be setup to NOT monitor during scheduled times. By applying multiple schedules to a monitor you can set up a schedule to monitor 24 x 7 except for Sunday from 2-4 AM (a scheduled outage you may have).

Multi-User Management is built in to provide read only or administrator privileges to certain users. You can set up multiple subaccounts for people to view reports only. They don't have access to setting up monitors, just viewing reports and downloading data. You can set up administrator accounts for users you want to administer your account. Administrators have the same privileges as the owner of the account (except for billing information, changing passwords, and user management). This user management system allows you to securely control administration and viewing without giving out the master account information.