Available Web Sites

Checking that everyone can access all the information on a web site is the most important form 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 tkane (latency) to connect to the server
Read the page	The 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. 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.

A 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.

access monitor

To check the availability of a web server you need to regularly monitor a few web pages on your site but also check other sites too (for comparison). If it is only your site that is unavailable then it strongly indicates a problem with the server or its connection to the Internet. Armed with this information you can ask the web host why they are not achieving the high server availability they are claiming.

You may also check up on availability by Site Vigil's traffic scan. If the web site log does not record any traffic for a certain length of time an alert is generated and a report made. The following screenshot shows a number of 'gaps' in the web traffic that reflect periods when the web server was out of action.

Traffic Gap

Site Vigil keeps a summary of the monitoring results with all sorts of useful information available at any time, it contains an access time distribution graph as well as details of average access speeds, download rates and recent monitoring events.

monitor server uptime

Site Vigil™ is a sophisticated web site monitoring tool that lets you thoroughly check your site. Improve the effectiveness of your web site by tracking the flow of visitors. Make sure your site is operational and your web host is giving a fast, trouble-free service. Automatically check the position of your site on search engines and the validity of all the links.

It runs on an ordinary Windows® PC, using your normal Internet connection to gather data quietly in the background. Periodically it will alert you as soon as a problem is spotted.

Site Vigil is available for a free 40 day trial, give it a try by going to the download page.
To look at the program features in more detail take an online tour of the product
We have a large reference section and a set of case studies to help you with all your monitoring needs.