Active Site Monitoring

ColdFusion MX 7 provides good fundamental information for monitoring site availability after you launch your site. But to get a true idea of how your site looks to the outside world, you should set up an active monitoring tool using another software product to collect information from outside your network. Most good ISPs and hosting providers offer some type of monitoring service, such as DeepMetrix's ipMonitor (www.deepmetrix.com).

If you are working on your own, however, I recommend using Mercury SiteScope, which provides a graphical dashboard of information enabling you to track and report server and site availability over days, weeks, and months. An evaluation copy of SiteScope is available at http://www.mercury.com/us/products/application-management/foundation/monitors/sitescope/. These types of reporting features are essential when you're analyzing trends to create a high-availability plan for your Web application.

TIP

Just seeing if you can open port 80 isn't enoughyou need to implement more-sophisticated server monitoring. Test for Web server health by checking specific URLs and looking for validation strings in returned Web pages.

Several other packages operate similarly to SiteScope and run on Windows 2000, Solaris, and Linux platforms. If you are not keen on setting up and managing your own monitoring station, a few services, such as Keynote's Performance Management Solution (www.keynote.com), will monitor your site from locations around the globe. Information received from your monitoring tool and these services is essential in determining and assessing availability. If your site is down due to network latency or other Internet-related issues, comparing the data produced by multiple monitoring tools or outside sources located in different locations will let you know which users couldn't get to your site. If you notice that one network provider is consistently slow or is not meeting its uptime agreement, you should reevaluate your use of that provider.