IIS monitoring tool PRTG

Let us skip the simplest website monitoring from the beginnings of the Internet, where a ping to the website measures its response time (which is still important!). The pure reaction time of a website does not necessarily mean something about the user experience: After the first ping, the loading of the actual page can still be felt forever. PRTG monitors far more, such as the loading time of the source code or even the complete website including all content. Scripts are used to simulate logon processes or purchase processes and to measure response times. Other scripts can read and check individual values from a web page. For this purpose, PRTG also supports the monitoring of the various web servers like Apache, IIS and more.

If the company operates internationally, there is another, additional challenge: if the web server is operated in the USA and is accessible without delay from the USA, this does not mean that customers from Europe or Asia also have fast access. In this case, the monitoring solution must allow monitoring of the web page from globally distributed locations. This only gives the administrator the information that something is wrong. What is not working properly is the next question he has to answer.

Special tools for monitoring web applications, so-called application performance monitoring or APM tools, go a step further and analyze the source code of the web application. In addition to ongoing monitoring, this is mainly the cause of research on causes. However, this is only about the causes within the application, which primarily concerns Dev-Ops and are mainly relevant for the development of the website. The administrator, who is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the website, needs other tools like PRTG for his research to be successful.

Web servers and databases provide code and data, load balancers control data streams, firewalls form security locks, and switches and routers distribute data that often travels over many stations from one location to another. This is a complex thing whose response time depends on far more than only source code. This includes physical computing units with components such as CPU or memory, or virtualized environments (VMware or Hyper-V), which in turn depend on the underlying hardware. Many applications, such as web servers like IIS and databases, also have a great impact on the performance of a website. PRTG monitors everything at a glance.

If the website responds slowly, each individual component can be the cause. The search for the error is complex and time consuming.

The best way is to avoid errors before they occur.

The recipe for this is IT monitoring or unified monitoring as an extension of network monitoring. If you constantly monitor all components involved in the publication process of a website with PRTG, you can identify and anticipate impending problems in advance: in the ideal case before any kind of impairment of the online appearance occurs. In the long term, systems and processes can be optimized based on historical monitoring data, thus improving the reliability and overall performance of the website on a sustained basis.