Category: Web monitoring service
Name of tool: SiteSeer
Company name: Freshwater Software Inc.
Price: Starts at $999/year for simplest monitoring tool (ten-day free
evaluation)
URL: http://www.freshwater.com/SiteSeer.htm
Windows platforms supported: 95, 98, NT and 2000
Quick description: A browser-based web site monitoring service
Strom-meter:
*** = Hey, not bad. One notch below very cool
Key features:
All done via a browser; there is no software to download and install. The
product tests for various web site performance metrics, including response
time and transaction completions.
Pros:
Extremely easy and straightforward to use. You go to their web site and
click on a button to start the testing process. Within minutes, you are
collecting data and producing reports.
Cons:
Refining the reports to get the exact information you are interested in will
take some experimenting.
Description:
Keeping track of your web site is not an easy job, especially when it comes
to understanding how your visitors can or can't access your site and whether
some random part of the Internet is down in any given moment. In the early
days of the web, you didn't have very sophisticated tools to do this. Pages
that had links to various traceroute queries from machines around the world
(such as http://noc.iccom.net/traceroute.html) were pretty much all you
could do. (Traceroute is a way to see the path IP packets take from your
computer to some specific destination. These tools let you initiate the
route from a remote location so you can get a better picture of Internet
delays.)
But traceroute is a very cumbersome and time consuming process--and not a
very good way to collect a lot of data quickly about your site availability
or to act as a roving eye around the world. A better solution is to make use
of one of various site-monitoring services. The one I like the best is
Freshwater's SiteSeer, which starts at about $1000 per year and can get more
expensive, depending on your needs.
SiteSeer can keep track of whether your site's URL responds to a ping, test
the overall response time of your web server, and get into more detail about
the time to complete a typical eCommerce or database transaction. It is a
web-based service: you don't download any software either to your own client
or to your web and database servers. And all of its reports are available
via the web as well, so you can keep up on your site's performance no matter
where you are.
You have a wide choice of monitoring types in addition to the ones
mentioned above. You also can test more than just web servers with this
product: included in the service are tests for Domain Name Servers, Email servers, FTP servers, and Network News servers. These tests go through a series of scripted transactions (such as verifying whether you can retrieve a list of
news groups, or sending and retrieving a test email message), and then
delivers a report on performance time. Some of the scripts are fairly
complex. You'll have to spend some time with the web-based forms to
figure out the sequence and make sure you set things up properly.
Fortunately, there are extensive help screens with lots of examples that can
walk you through the process.
I like SiteSeer because it is very flexible with both its notifications and
its reports, yet the various web screens are obvious and fairly simple to
comprehend and use. With some of the competing monitoring services, there
are so many screens to fill out that you can get lost deep in the menus and not
really understand what to do. SiteSeer has four main menu trees: a series to
handle configuration of the monitor tools, a series to handle alert
configuration and status, another series for reports, and help screens.
Navigating around them is easy.
You can send alerts to an email address, to a pager, or an SNMP console. One
of the annoying things about automated alert systems is being able to tune
the level of alerts TO the severity of the situation: you don't
want your network support staff to be buried under a ton of email telling
them that a line in Duluth is down for a couple hours. So SiteSeer can be
setup to just send a single alert for a particular persistent condition,
rather than a continuous stream. That's a nice feature.
You'll want to spend some time customizing your reports, which can be
tailored to your particular needs by simply reducing the data
displayed to a few key parameters. You will quickly see
where the problems are and be able TO take the appropriate action, such as
calling your ISP to ask them to bring up your downed connection.
The only real complexity about SiteSeer is how you purchase the product.
There are three different service levels and two choices (in each service
level) of monitor bundles for the service. The Gold service allows
monitoring from a single source, the company's Colorado network operations
center. The Global service extends this to up to five places around the
world. The Global Plus service extends this to over a dozen of Freshwater's
global monitor locations. You can sign up for five monitor locations or five
URLs, or up to a combination of multiple monitors and URLs, depending on how
much data you want to collect and where you think your customers are located
around the world. Perhaps the best thing is to first experiment with the
trial account (which allows you to set up a limited number of monitors and
produce reports) before you make any decision. And Freshwater makes a second
product, called SiteScope, which is intended to monitor NT and Unix server
processes and uses agents that are installed on your own servers.
Web site monitoring is an active area, and there are many vendors selling
various different tools (check out my review in cNet's Enterprise section,
at http://enterprise.cnet.com/enterprise/0-9563-7-3582726.html). But SiteSeer
does its job well, won't take a lot of time to get going, and can provide
some valuable insights into how others can -- or can't -- get access to your
site.
Strom-meter key:
**** = Very cool, very useful
*** = Hey, not bad. One notch below very cool
** = A tad shaky to install and use but has some value.
* = Don't waste your time. Minimal real value.
Bio: David Strom is president of his own consulting firm in Port Washington, NY. He has tested hundreds of computer products over the past two decades working as a computer journalist, consultant, and corporate IT manager.
Since 1995 he has written a weekly series of essays on web technologies and
marketing called Web Informant. You can send him email at david@strom.com.
