The 5 Best Website Monitoring Tools Of 2014

In this digital age, it seems that almost every business imaginable now operates with at least some component of their company online. Couple that with the reality that there is no shortage of possible issues that may arise and impact the end customers experience and it quickly becomes apparent that businesses of all sizes should care about ‘up time’.

A recentinfographic highlighted research showing that a single minute of downtime costs businesses $5,600 on average. To the average business owner, $5k is a lot of capital to lose in a single minute.

After years of using many uptime and performance analysis tools, we’ve compiled this list of the 5 best website monitoring tools available in 2014:

1. New Relic 
Easily one of the most impressive uptime and performance monitoring suites on the internet today, New Relic has placed themselves on the market corner of data analytics for IT infrastructure. With clients ranging from Airbnb.com to NBC and Sony, New Relic has one of the most impressive offerings of it’s kind. The tool set allows you to view code level performance metric trends, exact SQL statements causing issues, set alert policies based on thresholds you set and so much more - all in near real time in one of the sexiest user interfaces available in this space.

2. Pingdom
A strong runner up to New Relic, Pingdom is a definite favorite amongst uptime and performance monitoring tool suites. Having arguably the fastest response rate witnessed amongst compared toolsets and the ability to notify on-call personnel via SMS, Twitter, Email and even In-App notifications, Pingdom’s suite of tools is robust enough for almost any setup, at prices that even small businesses can afford. Their (free online tools){http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/} come in handy almost daily in my line of work, generating waterfall reports for your websites page load speed to checking DNS health. Priced right with a great UI, Pingdom is a great choice for any business desiring up to the second uptime/downtime monitoring.

3. PagerDuty
Taking a unique approach to uptime alerts and performance management, PagerDuty is seeking to solve the schizophrenic nature of managing various tool sets that do different things by allowing you to connect all these tools into one, seamless reporting and alert management tool. PagerDuty also allows you to create on-call schedules, manage them visually, and direct alerts from various tools/systems to the right people. This includes the ability to set up backups and call rings so major alerts never get missed.

4. Copperegg
You probably haven’t heard of this company yet, but copperegg is one of the fastest growing uptime and performance monitoring tool suites in the market. Used by the likes of Goodwill and Minecraft, copperegg makes data visualizations fun, and offers a few features not found in the majority of monitoring software solutions. One of it’s coolest features is the integrated Amazon EC2 Monitoring, giving it’s users the ability to monitor, alert, and report on all of your EC2 instances from one, clean, cohesive central dashboard. For Amazon users this is critical to running cost effectively - sizing up and down at the right times to avoid unncessary overhead, and reducing product outages or slowdowns for customers.

5. APPDYNAMICS
With an offering closest to New Relic, without all the ‘pazazz’, AppDynamics brings up the rear as a strong contender, with integrations ranging from iOS apps, mongoDB, PHP, MySQL, Java and more. Much like New Relic, AppDynamics shows code level detail, visual stack traces, and more to help you identify down to the function or class method called that is causing the issue, and provides real time visibility to the issues at hand. The biggest drawback for this platform isn’t it’s plethora of features and offerings, but is primarily it’s huge price tag, which is why for this list, it’s bringing up the rear.

Author Bio:

William Scott, who resides in Charleston, West Virginia, with his family is an accomplished technology author. He has written extensively on topics ranging from technology applications for small business to travel applications. When he is not writing or running his small business, he enjoys hiking and spending time outdoors.