Can Website Testing Tools Replace The Benefits of Monitoring Service?

Tracking website uptime and keeping a regular check on performance is one of the most challenging task for website owners. Different tools are being used for testing different aspects of the website, some of them are used for testing the site speed while others test performance & load impacts. Due to availability of numerous tools on the web, site owners get confused in selecting the right one for their websites. Especially, new site owners may not have clear understanding on website requirements, and out of confusion they likely make wrong judgements and face difficulties in addressing the challenges. Generally, online businesses use testing tools and monitoring services in order to assess the performance of their websites. Though they both are intended to track website uptime, they have significant difference in concept and approach.

Why Websites Use Various Testing Tools?

The main objective of these testing tools is to understand the behavioral pattern of the website under different conditions. It is critical for online businesses to make sure that their sites are responding normally to the customers despite the challenges to their websites. Unfortunately, when there is an unplanned downtime, websites shut down and suddenly stop working. The reason could be anything from network or server issues to power outage or DDoS attack. For instance, many websites either break down or suffer with performance issues, especially during busiest season of the year. This is mostly because of the inability of websites to handle the incoming volume of traffic. Hence, the first step towards protecting the site is to understand its response under various circumstances. For this reason, many site owners conduct regression tests such as load, performance and stress tests on their websites by simulating various high stress or peak volume conditions. These tools measure the performance and endurance of websites under different test conditions by restricting the resources, increasing the volume of traffic or by imitating network or database issue.

Testing Tools vs Monitoring Service

Without understanding the true benefits of monitoring services, business owners are under the false impression that testing tools provide a comprehensive check for their websites. In fact, some of them have a misconception that just by using load testing and stress testing tools, they can analyze the scalability and performance of their websites. It can be true that these services allow business owners understand the site response under different stress conditions, but none of them have comprehensive features that site monitoring service can provide to check the entire work flow of the website. website monitor not only detects downtime or slow response time of the websites but also helps to drill down and understand the reason for the interruption in the functionality of a website. Testing tools might help business owners determine the site's reaction for various conditions, but the tools cannot anticipate and alert possible issues like monitoring services can. Monitoring services offer real time monitoring by keeping a check on websites very often for their availability.

Use Monitoring Services as First Step Towards Website Protection

Since both are intended for different purposes, it is not a good idea to replace one tool for the other. However, it is wise to use monitoring service as a first step towards website protection because it has better performance reporting and bottleneck detection. While site testing tools provide only conditional reporting, website monitoring offers better solution in detecting problems and alerting basic performance and downtime issues. Moreover, the functionality of each testing tool is significantly different from the other and the site owners may need to deploy more than one tool to test the ability of website for various conditions. This is not the case with a comprehensive website monitoring service . By just employing a single monitoring service, it is possible to gather comprehensive information on websites and monitor how the site is working vis-a-vis user demands. By using this data the site owners can alter their systems and resources to address the challenges before they ever grow into bigger issues that cause severe performance degradation or site downtime.