Website Monitoring and Reliability

Having a fast and reliable website are some of the most important fundamentals of any website. Websites with slow response times, high error rates and periods of downtime can significantly affect customer trust and engagement. The importance of having tools set up to catch such problems becomes vital.

Having monitoring tools setup on your website allows problems to be caught earlier, for them to be easier to resolve and any potential issues to be picked up before they cause any major damage.

Website Pinging

As standard, Fastrack sets up a pinging service on your website that monitors your website every five minutes. This imitates a user visiting your website and notifies us if any issues have been found. The benefit of this is that it can pick up more than just the server performance. For example, if anything were to happen to your DNS this monitor will pick it up. This monitor can be setup on more than just your website, but also any external services your website may use, for example a rates API.

Server Monitoring

Another product that we have had great success with is with NewRelic. This is a service that will monitor every aspect of your website. It will reveal errors, what page those errors occurred, server response time, time spent doing certain operations, time spent querying the database, time spent communicating with external services and many more. This is a must for any larger website, as it provides details on the website performance to really quickly resolve and optimise the website.

Browser Monitoring

Another great functionality of NewRelic is their browser monitoring. This allows us to see how the website is performing in the user’s browser, what browsers are slow, JavaScript errors, and performance from various geographic locations. This is something that will continue to grow in importance as more websites rely on JavaScript to power the user experience.

Status Pages

Status pages can be a good way to communicate to stakeholders the general status of the website. This can include details on the current status of the website, previous downtime, deployment history, server health and user notes. Fastrack powers their status pages on an open source project named Cachet. This allows us to do a range customisation while keeping costs low.