15 Best Website Monitoring Services and Tools for 2024
Every single website is built to achieve a specific purpose whether it’s an e-commerce platform, a blog, or a company website. However, how do you know if yours has been achieving what it was built for?
Do you think that installing a few analytics plugins for your website is what you need to track how your website has been performing? Here’s what an analytics report would look like.
Website performance is quite different from just understanding where your website visitors come from and how many of them buy from you.
A good performing website is one that has the least downtime, loads quickly, is accessible all around the globe, and is fully functional.
Let us look at the performance report of a website.
Now, how do you know if your website has been performing on these parameters?
Of course, you could ask your friends and family in different parts of the world to go through your website on different devices and tell you if your website is working. But, would that qualify as a decent sample size? Would their definition of “it’s working perfectly fine” be apt?
How do you know if your website is compatible with every device that exists?
It might sound like a herculean task and you might feel as though having a website now seems like more of an effort than what it’s worth.
But, before you jump to this conclusion, allow us to introduce you to “web monitoring services” and how they can be the website watchdog you never thought you could have!
With website monitoring services, you can be assured that if anything on your website malfunctions, even if it’s in the middle of the night, you will be informed and you can look into it before any of your users notice.
Let’s begin.
Table of Contents
What are the Best Website Monitoring Services?
1. StatusCake
Best all in one website monitoring services solution.
StatusCake is one of the easiest to use website monitoring services that can help you generate powerful reports about your website’s health.
Giants like Google, Netflix, NASA, and a few others use their services! Not convinced? Allow us to tell you why StatusCake could be your monitoring suite.
While most websites work well with HTTP monitoring, StatusCake provides a wide range of advanced options for you to choose from based on your plan. The various tests that StatusCake can perform for you include TCP, SMTP, SSH, PING along with the regular HTTP tests.
StatusCake allows you to check the speed at which your page loads and tracks the server response time, load time calculated in milliseconds, the size of the page, and the number of requests that are needed for the page to load.
Not only can you choose how often the speed tests are conducted (i.e. every 1, 5, 10, 30 minutes) but you will also be intimated if any particular page takes longer than usual to load.
It also alerts you as soon as your SSL certificate loses validity or is due for renewal.
StatusCake’s domain monitoring feature can help you identify if your website has been flagged or blacklisted or marked as spam. You also get details about your domain and alerts you when you have an upcoming plan renewal.
Along with monitoring the health of your server, StatusCake allows you to monitor your CPU, RAM, or storage helping you monitor your resource utilization.
StatusCake is one of the easiest tools, especially for beginners. You can always take the help of their tutorials for beginners and they also have a vast knowledge base for developers that can help you become a pro at effectively managing your website.
You can generate and share customized reports about your website’s health with clients and employees to highlight specific bits of information.
While most website monitoring tools send alerts through SMS and calls, StatusCake can be integrated into 18 different platforms such as Twitter, Telegram, DataDog, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and others.
Pricing
There are three plans for you to choose from.
You can start with the Free plan and use it as a trial. Once you feel that your website has been performing efficiently because of the service, you can switch to the other plans. StatusCake also allows you to choose between monthly billing and annual billing cycles. The monthly billing would cost you $0, $24.49, and $79.99 respectively.
2. Dotcom-Monitor
Best comprehensive performance monitoring tool for websites, pages, servers, and applications.
Dotcom-Monitor could be just what you are looking for if you have a complex website.
Initially, you could only use this tool for uptime monitoring but it has evolved over the years to provide much more. Let us look at some of the features that make it stand a notch above the other website monitoring tools available.
Whether you are a beginner, a developer, or at the managerial level, different forms of reporting can allow you to customize the reports generated by this tool.
Not only can you include multiple devices or websites to be monitored, but you can also customize your dashboards to get an overview of the critical parameters for each, like uptime, last tested, location it was tested from, or the status of the page.
Moreover, you will not have to analyze all the statistics to create reports, but you can allow Dotcom-Monitor to create them for you and get them delivered straight to your inbox in a PDF format. This not only saves you a lot of time but isn’t it extremely convenient at the same time?
Since sending alerts is one of the prerequisites of any good website monitoring service, you can also create groups where these alerts are sent and choose a time when notifications are sent.
You can write custom scripts for different types of issues and create escalation frequencies for problems that get overlooked.
You can also use the filter option to ignore alerts caused by specific errors like when you schedule your site for maintenance.
Additionally, by integrating its services into the most commonly used tools like Slack, Dynatrace, Salesforce, Twitter, Trello, Google Sheets, Zapier, and others. This ensures that everybody in charge stays in the loop and every issue gets remedied promptly.
Using Dotcom-Monito’s XML Data Feed and APIs, you can interact with your monitoring agents in different locations and update them about the status of your monitored website once an alert has been sent.
The service also allows you to create custom scripts to simulate end-user journeys on your website not only on your device of choice but also on your choice of browser. These scripts are later used as benchmarks during load testing.
Dotcom-Monitor also allows you to schedule when you want your site to be monitored. While it is ideal that the monitoring goes on round the clock, you can choose the times that you do not want the service to monitor your pages.
Companies like Dell, Dish, Xerox have chosen Dotcom-Monitor because of special enterprise features and functionalities like SSO Authentication, white-labeled reports, private agents, premium monitoring locations, account historical auditing.
This helps large companies manage their unique but important business needs.
Pricing
While you can begin with a 30-days free trial, Dotcom-Monitor has four pricing plans to choose from.
In addition to the packages offered, you can also choose a few add-on services like premium location monitoring, rich internet applications, record video on every run for an additional price.
3. Montastic
Best flexible website monitoring tool for personal websites.
Montastic is as simple and easy to use as its interface looks.
All you have to do is enter the URL of the site that you want to monitor and begin monitoring your website. This tool is available free of cost and the feature-rich ones are available at a price.
Even though the services provided by Montastic are quite basic, it gets the work done. Since personal websites do not require complex services, Montastic is the perfect free tool that tells you what you need.
Every time your site is down you will receive a notification. Montastic does not have a dashboard but sends alerts through messages every time your site is down.
With the free tool, your website will get checked every 30 minutes and you can monitor 9 URLs at the same time. You can also choose up to 20 members who get alerted when your website goes down. Quite good for a personal website isn’t it?
Once your website is up and running again you get notified through email again.
Pricing
Apart from being the most preferred free website performance monitoring tool, one of the greatest things about Montastic is that there is no long term commitment.
Anytime you feel you need more technical service, you can cancel their subscription and switch to any other service provider. All the subscriptions work only on a monthly basis and are very affordable, where even the business plan costs just $49.
4. AppDynamics
Best website monitoring for detailed analytics and reporting.
AppDynamics is known for its detailed analytics dashboard that provides you complete, in-depth information about every single aspect of your website through data-visualizations.
The conceptual map on their applications tab gives you a detailed map showing the exact path that a user takes on your page including the flow of HTTP calls, Java, PHP, databases, and servers.
You also get an overview of which pages on your site receive the most number of HTTP calls, errors, response times, transaction snapshots, transaction scores in the form of simple graphs.
It also allows you to break down your traffic to web users and mobile users where you can study from pie charts on the dashboard, what devices are they using, the browsers, load time, operating systems, and more.
While AppDynamics offers synthetic monitoring as well as real user monitoring, synthetic monitoring can be useful for detecting early errors and broken links only.
The other key features that AppDynamics offers include infrastructure monitoring, network monitoring, and business performance monitoring.
These features not only help you monitor the health of your servers, databases, and network but also help you determine revenue paths, segment your customers.
You can also track important business processes from end-to-end and get deep insights into customer experiences on the website that affect the revenue that you generate.
Pricing
Businesses with online stores can use this website monitoring service to identify where their customers come from, their activity on their pages and how the site can be optimized to raise the end-user experience level.
5. DataDog
Best website performance monitoring tool that allows log analysis.
The installation process of DataDog might seem tedious initially but once you get that done, operating the rest of the solution should be relatively easy.
You would have to install some agents on your page that will live there and monitor your site. You will however be guided smoothly through detailed instructions.
Once you are in, you can choose to have the clean dashboard that DataDog provides by default or could move and add widgets to customize it according to your needs.
You can use their mobile application and get timely alerts whenever something goes amiss on your website. Right from uptime monitoring, CPU usage, memory consumption, and others, you can set alerts for each important metric. These alerts are referred to as Monitors.
DataDog uses ML to detect if there are any anomalies on your page.
When you need to generate reports, you will be required to choose the metrics that are important to you within a time frame and generate reports manually.
Since DataDog is an agent-based system you will be required to deploy one person to oversee the functioning of the solution periodically.
Pricing
There are several packages that DataDog offers to users based on their needs. Instead of being forced to buy bundled services where you do not use all features, DataDog allows you to pick the services that matter to your website’s performance the most.
6. Pingdom
Best website performance monitoring service for affordable end-user monitoring.
Pingdom allows you the option to choose between Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring so that you can fix your website before any of your visitors notice it. You can either choose one of these tools or use both of them for complete website health monitoring.
Unlike other website monitoring services, Pingdom double checks every alert that it sends to you on spotting an error.
The tool’s speed monitoring feature allows you to identify if your page has been loading slow, pinpoints on the element causing it, and also provides you a page history, helping you determine whether effective changes were made.
Pingdom simulates transactions on your page to ensure that there is no broken link in the transactions on your page. Using their transaction monitoring feature, you can also monitor new user registrations, user logins, search, shopping cart, login, and URL hijacking at scheduled intervals.
It’s public status system also allows you to tell your customers and colleagues how well your website has been performing and that you have been meeting all the necessary SLAs.
Once users start visiting your website, Pingdom helps you determine if your users are having a poor experience using its Real User Monitoring (RUM) tool.
Pingdom helps you identify if users have been having poor experiences on your website it also helps you narrow down to the regions and time zones where the issues have been occurring.
You can get page-specific metrics, group certain pages together, and monitor their health from a single dashboard.
Using the historic data that Pingdom offers, you can also analyze how your website has been performing over the years, determine which is the most visited page, most used browsers, and devices, bounce rates, and active sessions.
Pricing
You can try Pingdom for free for 14 days.
If you choose to pay monthly, each of these plans would cost you $15. As your website gains traction, you can also scale your plan and choose between 10-1000 uptime checks, 1-80 transaction checks or speed tests, and 100K-10M page views respectively.
7. New Relic
Best website performance monitoring software for organizations with a business-critical web presence.
The features of New Relic are quite advanced for small businesses but are ideal for medium to large-sized organizations that have complex websites and applications.
Not only do you get alerts about uptime and downtime through their real-time dashboard, but you get deeper insights into the digital experience of the users on your page.
While using New Relic, you can drag and drop the metrics that matter the most to your website’s performance and create a custom dashboard.
Using this application, you can monitor the response time, error rates, and throughput on your website. Based on the results you can determine if the current bandwidth you have is sufficient for your website.
Their transaction monitoring feature gives you an overview of the slow transactions in a time frame and metrics that help you narrow down to the cause.
You can get the minutest details about each transaction right from information about your slowest HTTP request right down to the SQL query.
New Relic uses Applied Intelligence to reduce the noise created by the alerting feature that most website monitoring software generally has. You can share and resolve issues that arise on your website from one dashboard with your team members.
You can also use New Relic’s integrated alerting channels like Campfire, PagerDutyJ, Jira, and HipChat.
You can also use the system to raise tickets that reflect in your applications like Jira.
Another distinguishing feature that New relic offers is securing customer data. Your customer data is backed up regularly and stored in a secure data center. Moreover, you can also control the information you send to New Relic by using the customizable security function.
If data security is of prime importance to your business you can also utilize the Enterprise Security Mode to ensure that sensitive data never gets shared on your website accidentally.
Pricing
Based on your requirements, if you are a business that requires a scalable solution, New Relics has scalable enterprise options with advanced security, support, and user management.
8. UptimeRobot
Best uptime monitoring service.
UptimeRobot offers all the basic services you will need if you have a simple website but other advanced features like keyword monitoring, maintenance windows, custom HTTP requests, and more are available only to advanced users.
Apart from sending you alerts as soon as your website goes down, the service also alerts you about the renewal of your site’s SSL certificate 30 days ahead.
With the advanced package, you can create a maintenance window so that you do not get false downtime alerts during scheduled maintenance. You can also create a status page with your team members and share the status of incidents from one place.
Their port and ping feature allows you to monitor any specific port that you want. Using this with the cron job monitoring also helps you monitor your servers and other intranet devices connected to the internet.
If you are an advanced user, UptimeRobot will also check your site’s performance from multiple locations to avoid false positives.
Since it’s only important for your business to show up when certain relevant searches are made, Uptime Robot’s keyword monitoring feature can help you continuously track if the particular keywords show up on your page.
Pricing
While the free plan is a good option for personal pages, there would still be some manual monitoring involved. If your website affects a major chunk of how you do business, it would be recommended to choose from the other plans.
9. StackPath
Best website monitoring solution to speed up and secure your website.
Whether you own a blog, a professional website, a digital store, an SMB website, or any other web application, you can use the rapid deployment feature to set up your website in a few simple steps or let it be taken care of by StackPath’s API.
Once you have completed the setup, StackPath allows you to choose from the 37 monitoring nodes that it has, allowing you the control to check your website’s performance in the locations that matter to you the most.
StackPath’s dashboard is one of the cleanest and simplest out there, which gives you a crisp overview of your website’s from all the locations that you have chosen.
You can not only monitor the geographic availability but also get a full connection breakdown of the DNS lookup and negotiation, time to first byte, and content download.
StackPath’s CDN stores the content on your website in edge locations that are closer to the locations where your content is in demand. Using this service you can also get the SSL certificate for your website for free.
The best feature that StackPath has is the Web Application Firewall (WAF). While all the necessary protection such as XSS, CSRF, SQLi, SPAM, RFI, DDoS are turned on by default, you can review them based on your preferences.
You can also use their custom rules feature to block bots, users from specific locations, user agents, extensions, and other security tools to take the security on your site to the next level.
Pricing
You can either choose the services that suit your website the most or you can choose from their Edge Delivery Bundles that have been put together for different types of businesses.
10. Dynatrace
Best website monitoring software tool for startups looking to create an impact.
Instead of you having to dig through tonnes of data and reports to come to a conclusion, Dynatrace is known to make life simpler for website owners. Dyntrace’s AI engine, Davis, does all the processing and monitors your infrastructure to highlight all the issues for you.
The website performance monitoring tool is very easy to set up and has an excellent support team.
Get detailed reports about your servers’ health, resource utilization, server health, log monitoring, third-party data, network usage, and event integration using their advanced observability feature that you can scale as per your business needs.
Dynatraces’s strength lies in its AI using which it continuously monitors dependencies to identify the root cause of errors on your page.
You can use its integration solutions with platforms like JIRA, several Amazon Web Services, Bit Bucket, Drupal, and many more to get your entire team together, resolve alerts quicker, eliminate alert frenzies and work on different aspects of your online presence from one spot.
Once you sign up for a trial, all you have to do is install Dynatrace’s OneAgent, enter your details and let it study your environment, infrastructure, and start spotting errors.
Apart from its regular monitoring services, this tool is especially important for startups to have because of the digital business analytics that it provides. You will get clear visibility into your business KPIs, digital user experience (synthetic monitoring as well as RUM), impact on revenue, rate of conversion, and much more.
Pricing
Dynatrace also offers volume discounts for businesses to scale as per their needs.
11. LogicMonitor
Best cloud-based, agentless website monitoring platform tailored specially for your business needs.
LogicMonitor’s customizable and clean dashboards are a feature that can do wonders to give you a clear picture of what is happening on your website.
The data is presented in the form of visualizations and topological maps helping you identify the root cause of issues on your website faster.
There are 16 different types of report formats for you to choose from.
You can use synthetic monitoring to test your website’s internal as well as external ability, onboarding flows, activity within shopping carts, and much more.
The installation process of this website monitoring software, though guided, needs you to install collectors for each of the websites, applications, or devices that you want to monitor. LogicMonitor has special training sessions for you to get comfortable with the tool.
A distinguishing feature of LogicMonitor is that once you install the collector, the code of your solution opens and you can pretty much code and make changes to modify the solutions as per your needs.
This allows you to truly customize your solutions for your specific business. You do not need to be a coder to be able to do this.
Apart from multi-channel alerting you can also benefit from the multi-site feature if you own multiple websites.
Since LogicMonitor is a cloud-based service, all your data and selections get loaded onto a cloud and you can monitor your site from any part of the globe.
Pricing
LogicMonitor offers custom pricing for every single business.
12. SmartBear Alertsite
Best performance monitoring service for round the clock synthetic monitoring and the fastest alerting system on the planet.
SmartBear Alertsite can monitor your website externally, 24/7 from locations all around the globe with over 350 testing nodes. It monitors your website at the real user level so that you can identify actual problems that users face on your page.
You can also monitor your website internally behind your firewall, data centers, networks, or remote locations. Or, you can choose the Hybrid Deployment that SmartBear offers to gain complete visibility into the digital performance as well as end-user experience.
You can use their web recorder, DejaClick to monitor all the complex transactions on your page, and identify broken links before your customer faces them while making a transaction.
The alerting feature that SmartBear has is a notch above the others because of its granular target alerting, application performance management alerts, website performance alerts, website availability alerts, and more.
You can also utilize their integrations with services such as AppDynamics, Pagerduty, Splunk, Perfecto Mobile, and Ready API to manage your entire website from one location.
Pricing
SmartBear Alertsite’s pricing plans depend on your business needs. This website monitoring tool is ideal for medium to large-sized businesses.
13. Monitis
Best website performance monitoring tool for IT companies, web developers, and designers.
Monitis, now known as TeamViewer Web Monitoring provides you all the important features that a good website monitoring service should have.
You can use Monitis to avoid outages, get alerted when elements on your page affect the loading speed, detect broken links in your online shopping page through synthetic transaction monitoring, and allow you to monitor your page from 30 locations worldwide.
The service is a cloud-based service and allows you to log in to their portal through an app and you can monitor your website’s health from anywhere in the world.
The remote management feature also allows you to remotely control business-critical devices such as servers, laptops, and printers so you can tackle whatever kind of issue that arises instantly, irrespective of where you are.
Monitis allows you to generate reports on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis and also allows you to generate them instantly.
Pricing
While you can request special pricing for your website monitoring needs by requesting a quote, Monitis (TeamViewer) offers its packages for 9.90 Euros and 29.90 Euros per month for their custom plans.
Monitis is especially beneficial for SMBs as you can start with a small package and scale up as your business grows.
14. Solarwinds AppOptics
Best infrastructure monitoring service for enterprise-level monitoring with minimal administration.
This performance monitoring tool provides some advanced enterprise-level features which make it important to have robust machines that can support the software.
After alerting you about anomalies on your page, AppOptics also helps you narrow down to the root cause of problems for you.
Its modern infrastructure monitoring helps you keep a check on resource utilization as well as performance by services, processes, and containers.
You can collect and analyze the log data of your website’s performance over time which can in turn help you identify trends or compare performance and other metrics important to the health of your website.
Their combined dashboard feature helps you combine the infrastructure metrics as well as the internal website performance metrics to get a complete overview under one tab.
If your website has many interrelated elements dependent on the performance of each other, AppOptics’ auto-instrumented application service topology maps will help you identify the dependencies and causes of service degradation when it arises.
Pricing
If your business can benefit from the advanced features that AppOptics has to offer, this software could provide you a good return on your investment.
15. Better Uptime
Best infrastructure monitoring tool for monitoring intervals, reporting and integrations.
The ease of using this performance monitoring tool will surprise most people. It is exceptionally easy to set this up and has detailed step by step instructions as you configure your website.
With this service in your tool-kit, it is very difficult for you to miss a single downtime alert for your page. They offer unlimited alerts through calls, SMS, push notifications and integrations for an all-you-can-alert pricing.
Moreover, each of these alerts are sent only after being verified from 3 locations, keep the instances of false alerts low.
Better Uptime allows you to plug-in your infrastructure monitoring services and select the person you want to alert under their incident management feature. This feature also allows you a second-by-second timeline about what caused an error.
If you are using another website monitoring service, you can even plug that in with Better Uptime so that it can fill any gaps and complement the other.
The service also allows you to have multiple status pages, allowing you to keep the one for your internal team and your customers separate.
Pricing
Apart from offering a 60-day money-back guarantee, Better Uptime also offers custom quotes for enterprises based on their individual business needs and works well for large sized organizations.
What is Website Monitoring?
Imagine the person you assigned to monitor your website takes sick leave one day.
The last he checked the website’s performance was the previous day at noon. You get an email from a potential customer who says that he has been trying to access your website for the past 24 hours.
He wants to know whether you are still in business!
Not great for your business, is it?
How many customers did you lose during these 24 hours? Has it been more than 24 hours that your website was down? What if you had received notification as soon as your website went down?
Here is where website monitoring comes in.
There are two different types of website monitoring, real user monitoring, and synthetic user monitoring.
- Real user monitoring allows you to study the behavior and experience of real users who visit your website.
- Synthetic User Monitoring simulates user journeys on your website to help you identify broken links on your pages like a broken link before a user checkouts in the shopping cart.
Unlike manual monitoring, website monitoring happens round the clock.
The service that you choose helps you analyze the performance, availability, and functioning of your website. Once your service detects an anomaly on your page, most website monitoring tools also offer topology maps that help you narrow down to the root cause.
You can use it to monitor just ONE of your pages or your ENTIRE website.
It helps you measure the uptime of your website and also ensures that your website is available to everyone all around the globe. The best website monitoring services monitor your websites from multiple testing nodes across different locations like SmartBear Alertsite has 350 testing nodes.
Irrespective of where you are in the world, you can still use website monitoring to keep a check on your site’s performance.
You can create multi-member alert groups and integrate the tool with tools like JIRA and Slack so that your entire team gets alerts and everyone stays in the loop.
Website monitoring helps you detect any unauthorized changes that might have happened or can help you identify threats to your site and the data shared by your users.
These services also help you ensure that the SSL certificate of your website is valid and alert you close to the renewal. You can also get details about your domain, updates about renewal, and determine if your domain has been marked as spam or has been blacklisted.
Now there are two levels on which websites get monitored.
- Traditional local monitoring, the focus here is more on the server’s health rather than user experience on your site. If the server works, it confirms that the website is also working.
- Global monitoring, on the other hand, studies the server, monitors the uptime, checks for accessibility across the globe, and identifies DNS issues if there are any.
The best website monitoring tools are agentless and once you install them, all you have to do is solve the root cause of any malfunction on your page that the tool identifies for you.
Benefits of Using Website Monitoring Tools
Your website must always be up and running.
It must be accessible to everyone around the globe, even if a user searches from the tiniest and most remote village where your business might never expand.
While the internal infrastructure like the website design, the codes, scripts, forms determine the way your website performs, the external factors like the load time, response time, website availability determine the user experience.
All of these make it imperative to monitor your website 24/7.
Let us look at how website monitoring tools and services can help you seamlessly manage your website and its performance.
1. Never face an error message again with 24/7 performance monitoring
Website monitoring tools always send you alerts whenever they detect a glitch on your page. Through synthetic monitoring, you can even detect problems even before they happen.
There is hardly an instance where your website will be down and you will not know because performance monitoring tools send alerts through different channels like SMS, calls, emails, and other services like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and others.
You are in control of when you want to be alerted, who must be alerted, how to raise escalations if an alert goes unnoticed and status alerts after an issue gets resolved.
2. Get detailed information about your server’s health through infrastructure monitoring
The best monitoring tools allow you to monitor your internal infrastructure through their offerings where you can keep track of the world behind your firewall.
Whether it’s your server that is causing your website to load slower, the number of HTTP calls required when a request is made you can monitor your server’s health as well.
Keep track of resource utilization, CPU, storage monitoring, or determining whether your current bandwidth is sufficient to get the desired page load time, website monitoring services give you detailed analytics reports mostly from one customizable dashboard.
3. Receive immediate alerts about website downtime and identify the root cause
Even though website owners, especially, e-commerce platforms dread downtime, sometimes it may be inevitable. Your website could be down due to some programming error on your end, or it could be down if your server itself is down.
Most website monitoring tools alert you within seconds of your website going down and even notify you about micro-downtimes. They also allow you to schedule maintenance windows so that you don’t get false alerts when your site is down for maintenance.
Here’s an example of how a website monitoring service tells you precisely about the downtime of your website.
If your website has been facing downtime quite often recently, your website monitoring service might be able to help you spot a trend and identify the main culprit.
If it's your programming that has been causing the error, you can have your developers look at it immediately.
If it is the server, then probably it is time to look at other options.
4. 24/7 agentless website monitoring
Unlike manually monitoring your website, website monitoring services work round the clock throughout the year.