Alerting Options to Look for in a Monitoring Service

site monitoring is more than just checking the status of a website once a while. The main reason why people opt for monitoring is they want a support service for checking their website and get alert when there is any disruption to site availability and performance. Monitoring service provides comprehensive protection from downtime and takes care of all aspects to keep the websites running. Especially for online business owners, knowing the site issues ahead of the customers is very important because they don't want to lose their potential customers. Since online businesses are dependent on websites for business transactions, if they don't resolve issues quickly, they most likely experience significant loss in business revenues. It is very critical for them to receive prompt alerts to attend the issues immediately. Hence, they should ensure that the website monitor service they choose allows them to customize downtime notifications according to their specific requirements.

What are the Possible Issues with Alert Notifications?

The problem is, site owners either receive wrong notifications from the service provider or miss their alerts. This is because services that have limited monitoring locations or that rely on DNS lookups can make mistakes in verifying the websites and send wrong alerts to their customers. Another issue is, some service providers have restricted ability to alerting methods which means they communicate only through limited channels. Sometimes, the email or SMS alerts sent by the monitoring service would go unnoticed if the device is on silent or powered down. Missing critical alerts would keep the site owners ignorant of the real problem and will prolong the downtime situation further. To avoid such issues site owners should choose a monitoring solution with better alert/notification options. Service with wide range of alerting features would allow flexibility in configuring the alerts in a manner convenient to the users.

Customizable Alerting Features of a Quality Monitoring Service

Each web site monitoring service allows different set of features for alerting. Typically, most services offer basic features like device settings for sending the alerts and customization of message content for different errors. But a quality monitoring service allows advanced configuration settings for the benefit of their customers. It includes multiple ways of sending alert notifications including voice call & social media, setting the monitoring time interval to check the websites, configuring custom notification rules for each monitoring device, setting the alert cycles to repeat the notifications etc. To avoid wrong alerts, some services offer multi location monitoring. They check websites from different server locations and confirm the issue before they send an alert to site owners. Even after sending the alerts they check for the response from the customer. If response is not received within a specific period of time, then the service would contact appropriate people specified in the account settings to inform them of the issue.