Site Monitoring

Page Access Monior

Checking access to Web pages

Checking that everyone can access all the pages on a web site is the most important type of monitoring that Site Vigil can perform for you.

You'll want to know any problem that a client may experience accessing the site with a browser. Site Vigil offers a variety of options for web site page monitoring :

Checking presence of page The HEAD only option is used to just monitor that the page is present, it does not attempt to read the information in the page. The access time will reflect the time taken (latency) to connect to the server
Read the pageThe whole page (typically .htm or .html file) is read from the server. The access time is monitored and will account for the speed of reading the page.
Monitor page and its internal links The whole page is read and the time taken to read it is measured. After it has been downloaded the page is scanned for links to other pages on the same web site and these are checked for presence on the server. If the page has several links to the same page, this is checked only once. You should perform this check relatively infrequently.
Monitor page and all links This is the same as the previous option except that all internal and external links from the page are monitored (using the lightweight HEAD option just to check that the page exists).
Check page and all links and graphics The full page monitoring option includes not only links to other pages but all the graphics images used within the page.
Check page has changed Can be used in conjunction with the preceding options to monitor the page and alert you when the content has changed. You can use it to check whether a web page displays some special text appears on a news or diagnostics page. This may be due to the action of a virus.
Monitor if IP Address has changed Determines if the address of the host web server has been changed. This occurs when you move to a different web hosting company or server placement is changed.
Check HTML contents Just looking at a web page does not alert you that there may be a coding problem with the page. If there are errors, some browsers may not display the page properly and even more importantly, some search engines may not be able to scan the page and it will not appear in the search results list. The option will, after downloading the page, check the contents conform to the HTML standards.

An historical access time graph is built up showing you times when a server is heavily loaded on a weekly or daily basis. This information can be exported in HTML, XML or CSV format and analysed in statistical packages.

The measured access time is broken down into the time taken to lookup the domain name, the time to make the connection with the server and then the time to download the contents of the page. The download speed is measured and reported.

If an error occurs accessing the page or graphics an error is recorded in Site Vigil's log file and an alert is raised. The product offer a complete range of other site monitoring checks too.