It keeps your business always running, ensuring your customers and visitors can use your application all the time with delight. Without web application monitoring in place, your applications may slow down, face frequent downtimes, and be vulnerable to attacks. All these affect user experience which can negatively affect your business. Therefore, monitoring your application is crucial, and there are many web application tools to take care of that. Let’s discuss web application monitoring in detail and understand how it can help your business.
What is Web Application Monitoring?
Web application monitoring is the process of monitoring an application to ensure it performs optimally without errors and bugs. And the tools used in web application monitoring are called web application monitoring tools. These tools measure specific indicators that affect application performance. These indicators or metrics can be:
Application uptime Database performance CPU utilization Broken links, pages, and more
Using a web application monitoring tool, you can keep an eye on your application to find issues in terms of its performance, functioning, and uptime. This way, you can make your web application faster, more available, properly functioning, and optimize various aspects to deliver a superb user experience.
Why should you monitor your web applications?
Monitoring your web applications will provide you with a bunch of benefits. Not only can you detect issues in your web application quickly and fix them before any harm can come to it, but you can also maximize its performance. Let’s look at various aspects of how web application monitoring is beneficial.
Quick error detection
Errors and issues can pop up anytime, no matter how good your code is or how secure your systems are. And these errors, bugs, and other issues can affect your application’s performance and security. Ultimately, your end-users will notice it, and they won’t be happy about it. If you don’t fix it sooner, the issues can get bigger, annoy the users, and perhaps lead to vulnerabilities and cybersecurity risks. This is why it’s crucial to detect issues early, and web application monitoring tools do that for you. They will help you catch errors immediately when they emerge and notify you so you can fix them quickly.
Instant downtime alerts
Your web application can go offline or become unavailable due to many reasons. It can be server failure, cyberattacks, or disasters. Whatever be the reason, application downtimes are harmful to your business. It affects user experience along with your sales and revenue. Therefore, you must know when downtimes happen. Using a web application monitoring tool, you can get downtime information immediately. It will also enable you to inform your customers to reduce their hassles, and they will know you care for them. It builds better user trust.
Enhanced security
Cyber attackers are constantly on the lookout for vulnerabilities in web applications that they can leverage to hack into data and harm your business. If you don’t treat your security issues on time, there are higher chances of malicious attacks, data theft, and reputation damage. It may also invite compliance risks and penalties. Using a web application monitoring tool can detect security issues quickly and handle them on time. You can also run security patches, renew certificates, and fix other security loopholes in your web application so attackers cannot hack your web application and it remains safe and secure.
Better performance
Applications can slow down over time due to components and infrastructure used for service delivery, connectivity between components, and user interface. Network latency, bandwidth, CPU, memory, and disk space utilization are also some of the other factors that can impact your application performance. This is why you need to optimize your application for these issues so that your application can perform and function well. It will enhance your application’s loading speed and help you deliver an excellent user experience.
How to choose a web application monitoring tool?
You will find a large number of web application monitoring tools in the market. It may get confusing to choose the best one for your business. So, here are some points to help you find the best web application monitoring tool for your business.
Ease of use
The web application monitor you choose must not have a steep learning curve. It must be easy to use for your team so that you don’t waste much time on endless training. It must take minutes or hours to set up so that you can get it running quickly and start monitoring your applications. So, choose a tool that’s easy to use, and to check this, you can go for free trials that many service providers offer.
Compatibility
Check what all browsers and devices a web application monitor is compatible with. It must support popular browsers and devices so that you can test it comprehensively and understand how it behaves on different platforms. It will help you analyze the end-user experience and ways to optimize it.
Excellent reporting
The web application monitor must offer excellent reporting capabilities. It will provide details such as errors, the cause of errors, components that need optimization, resource utilization, etc. This way, you can have detailed information on all your application aspects to optimize its performance and end-user experience and compare your results over time.
Alerting
A good web application monitoring tool must provide instant alerts whenever things go south. You must easily be able to configure alerts, have various channels of alerting such as emails and SMS and connect to other systems for added functionality. It must also offer the option to filter alerts to help reduce false alerts. Want to avail of these benefits? Check out the best web application monitoring tools in the market.
Sematext Cloud
Sematext Cloud is an all-in-one solution that brings web application/API monitoring, metrics, and logs altogether. With Sematext Synthetics, you can make sure that your site is up and running, perform performance checks, and get notified when you have issues with your websites/APIs. You can then dig deeper into troubleshooting and check the metrics and logs of the services that are hosting your websites. By using Status Pages, you can create public and private pages to share the status and response time of your services with your customers or across internal teams. You can check your website’s performance from a Desktop point of view or simulate runs from a bunch of various devices like phones or tablets. With Sematext Synthetics SSL certificate monitoring capabilities, you can check your certificate validations and get notified when your certificate is close to its expiration date or if there are any certificate changes. Sematext Synthetics alerts you on the failure of all these checks with various notification hooks from your choosing, such as Slack, Email, Teams, Google Chat, and more.
PAESSLER’s PRTG
Get all-in-one monitoring software for your web application with the PRTG Network Monitor tool. It monitors your virtualized and cloud applications, Exchange, Server, SQL software, and other standard applications. The tool ensures that all your applications run smoothly and perform as expected. PRTG helps reduce the concerns of IT teams and admins in SMEs about standard applications of mail servers, firewalls, and databases. It also provides a complete overview of dashboards and detailed statistics on various applications on your network. Whenever PRTG discovers something unspecific, it alerts you instantly like the webserver is offline, the application does not respond, etc. It allows you to take action quickly before severe problems come up. With PRTG, you can create custom maps, gain an overview of workload and current status, and keep an eye on the firewalls. PRTG monitors the processes automatically and centrally so that your firms and sales will be safe. It also monitors data packets, traffic, bandwidth, and other network metrics or elements. In addition, it keeps track of the applications and their resources. Use PAESSLER’s PRTG for free to monitor your web applications or choose a fully-featured paid plan and take a 30-days free trial at no hidden costs.
Dotcom-Monitor
Dotcom-Monitor monitors multi-step web transactions for functionality, accessibility, and performance from across the world and inside the network. Create scripts easily to monitor transactions like shopping carts, signups, and portal logins. You can record the user path during navigation of web applications and uploading into the portal. Use the global monitoring network of Dotcom-Monitor to set up monitoring from multiple locations or use a Private Agent to monitor inside the network. Get the review of the charts and receive alerts instantly on any failures and understand the problem to reduce the downtime of your web application. It monitors critical paths taken by end-users, including login forms, verifying website content, and eCommerce applications. With Dotcom-Monitor, you will be able to script end-user interactions easily to ensure the performance and proper functionality of Rich Internet Applications, including HTML5, Flash, Flex, Silverlight, Java, AJAX, etc., and web elements. Boost your web application performance with the Dotcom-Monitor’s critical features like reporting, alerts, APIs, web recorder, private agents, filters, schedules, integrations, and more. You can also view the live status of your web application in an integrated and single interface. Realtime reports show you the high-level information you need, such as aggregate performance metrics. You can share dashboards easily with clients and users outside your organization. Perform trend analysis like load time, response time, and availability to compare historic web application monitoring data with the present one to predict the future results. Start using the services at $19.95/month and take a 30-days free trial to experience all the features and benefits.
ManageEngine’s Applications Manager
Gain deeper visibility into the user experience and performance of your businesses’ infrastructure components and critical applications with ManageEngine’s Applications Manager. It helps you isolate each performance issue across the application and resolve them from URL to code before the customers get affected. ManageEngine can help organizations of various sizes automate and improve DevOps and IT processes, deliver better outcomes, and ensure optimal user experience. It comes with synthetic transaction monitoring, web application monitoring, real user monitoring, multi-cloud monitoring, and more. Maximize your revenue and application usage by acting on the issues that impact application performance, such as tracking digital experience, quantifying revenue, understanding customer journey, and more. The tool allows you to detect problems instantly and troubleshoot faster with the help of accurate root cause analysis. ManageEngine allows SRE/DevOps teams to correlate changes in the performance with code build and verify if there is any impact due to frequent code changes. It can quickly find problems in application code, infrastructure issues, improper configuration, and more to send a quick alert and help your team respond to the issues faster. ManageEngine comes in two editions; the first one provides monitoring, reporting, and alerting features ideal for small businesses that monitor a maximum of 500 applications based on the load. In the second edition, you will get all the features similar to the Professional edition, plus failover and distributed monitoring capabilities. Start your free trial today.
SolarWinds
Know your web application health status with SolarWinds’ Server and Application Monitor. It helps you solve critical issues immediately by monitoring app components, remediating issues automatically like restarting app pools, etc. Identify resource usage and server load for metrics such as memory, network, disk, CPU, and more to maximize infrastructure resource utilization. The synthetic transaction tracks the response time of the complex applications outside and inside of the firewall. Server and Application Monitor always ensure that your web applications are healthy and available for your customers at all times. It monitors worker processes, requests, threads, cache, connections, network I/O, HTTP binding, logon attempts, URI cache, memory usage, and more. SolarWinds helps balance resource and server load allocation by giving you a deeper insight into web application load. You can understand the key performance statistics that include memory usage, network traffic, number of user connections, disk capacity, CPU utilization, and more. Furthermore, get access to monitor more than 200 applications such as Linux, SQL, Java, Microsoft Exchange, Windows, etc. You can also extend monitoring to homegrown applications through a single web interface and discover the issue immediately and act upon it faster to resolve the problems. Get an email link to access a 30-days free trial. Its subscription and perpetual licensing start at $1622.
Nagios
Get the best web application monitor software for you with Nagios that provides complete monitoring solutions for websites, web services, transactions, and web applications. You will get a lot of essential benefits like:
Enhanced web application and website availability Higher app performance Faster detection of website defacement, website hijacking, and outages Capacity planning for application and web server upgrades.
Nagios is the most trusted and powerful monitoring software in the market that thousands of users from small to big companies use to get their job done without any hassle. It will solve your toughest challenges within some time. Download your free trial now and solve the issues faster.
Pingdom
Get a web application monitoring solution with SolarWinds Pingdom for your peace of mind and a great user experience. Ensuring your web applications are always available to your users is necessary, and thus, Pingdom is there for you so that your web application will be fully functional and operational. Pingdom ensures your users will get uninterrupted and immediate access to the online services you provide. It checks your website every minute to ensure proper function. The moment your web application stops responding to the pings, it will alert you via email or SMS. It will also recommend specific solutions for you to take immediate action. Go with your troubleshooting procedures to establish the same functionality as soon as possible. Pingdom provides a network of more than 100 servers located in various data centers across the globe to ensure performance and availability. You can integrate Pingdom with popular platforms like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Slack to receive alerts. It also comes with uptime status pages so that you can share web applications’ availability with your clients. Choose whether you want to share your current status or with historical data. Pingdom provides you with the key, so you use the key to unlock an excellent experience for users. Customize your subscription according to your business demands at a starting price of $10/month and avail of many features. Start your free trial today and experience the difference.
Uptrends
Make your site work well with Uptrends’ Web Application Monitoring software. Test your website core functions, such as signups, payment screens work, shopping carts, and logins, to know what happens when stuff breaks. You can set up a transaction monitor to verify if your web application works the way you want. Record your transactions securely with Transaction Recorder by simply clicking and navigating through your website. The recorder captures your path, so the steps are tested continuously on a worldwide network of 228 checkpoints in a Chrome Browser or behind the firewall with your Private Checkpoint. In addition, you can ensure your customers are able to sign in, signup, interact with forms, and check if the chat service is operational. Find out the steps that are working poorly and see what exactly is breaking. You can saturate the testing with Concurrent Monitoring and check web applications from various checkpoints at a single glance. When something does not go on track, you will get immediate notification. You will have complete control of the scripts to modify, add, or delete user interactions. Once you are done with your modification, you can update the scripts with an API. You can also integrate the scripts with the deployment tools to set up new transactions. Uptrends brings as low a price as $15.47/month for smaller teams. You can also try the software for 30-days for free and decide if it’s suitable for you.
Conclusion
A good web application monitoring tool can help you maximize your application’s performance, uptime, and functionality. This way, you can deliver an excellent user experience and keep achieving more success for your business. You may also be interested in the best website monitoring tools.
