Website Uptime Monitoring
Best practices for monitoring website uptime and performance
Continuously monitor website and web server uptime
When you’re effectively monitoring web servers, you can detect performance issues that could affect your website uptime and the performance of other critical apps your business relies on. Monitoring web servers and websites lets you see:
- Slow page load times
- Application pool availability
- Website request response times
To minimize downtime, you can take immediate action right from the console. Restart or stop a website, kill processes, restart services, reboot servers, and stop or recycle app pools.
Monitor front-end website performance
Consistently monitoring uptime performance is the best way to keep your website up and running. With SolarWinds® Web Performance Monitor (WPM), you can see website components and their load and response time metrics, which can help you identify and troubleshoot website load time issues. WPM is designed to help you:
- Identify and diagnose latency issues for heavy page elements like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, and third-party plugins
- See the tasks consuming the most time, including DNS lookup, connection time, send time, time to first byte, and content download
- Drill into infrastructure performance issues that affect website availability
- Set alerts for images that are not matching
- Detect when a site is down and automatically restart it to minimize downtime
- Get notified about incomplete or slow web transactions and pages
- Monitor the health and performance of your IIS web servers, websites, and application pools
Test end-user experience from multiple locations
SolarWinds web monitoring software allows you to test the user experience from multiple locations (inside the firewall or in the cloud) to gain insight about the global user experience.
- Record a transaction and play it back from as many locations as required—from inside the firewall, remote locations, and locations in the cloud
- Quickly deploy transaction players to Amazon EC2
Monitor website user experience
SolarWinds WPM tracks the transaction recordings of every page. When you monitor individual pages, you gain greater insight about the pieces that make up a transaction, and where problems are occurring. Website Performance Monitor is built to send alerts of website performance problems before end users are affected.
It could be that the overall transaction completes as expected, but one of the pages takes longer than it should. If that occurs in the final step of the transaction, there’s the risk that customers will abandon the process at that critical point. Monitoring user experience helps keep you informed about web transaction health and page load times for multiple locations to isolate whether the problems you are seeing are location-based or worldwide.
"WPM alerting has permitted us to get faster alerts of issues with critical web apps such as online banking. Faster alerting means we can resolve issues sooner and increase uptime."
John Predmore
Network Administrator
First Bankers Trust Company
With our DIY deployment wizard, you’ll be monitoring website uptime in about an hour.
Web Performance Monitor
- Monitor web services and SaaS application performance.
- Experience your web-based app like a user.
- Troubleshoot with detailed load-time metrics.
Starts at
WPM, an Orion module, is built on the SolarWinds Platform
