Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Site24x7 web content monitoring

Site24x7 is a tool for monitoring the performance and availability of your company’s online services. While website change monitoring software is often used to alert you of mentions of your business online or changes to competitor websites, Site24x7 is instead used to monitor your own websites, cloud services, servers, databases, networks, and apps.

In our Site24x7 review, we look at what makes the service different so you can decide whether it’s a useful tool for your business.

Pricing

Site24x7 offers too many pricing plans, making purchase decisions needlessly complex (Image credit: Zoho)

Plans and pricing

Site24x7 has at least 13 different payment plans and 17 optional add-ons. You can pay monthly or annually, with an annual payment receiving a 10% discount. There’s a free forever plan that includes basic monitoring of up to five URLs or servers.

Website monitoring starts at $10/month for 10 websites/servers with a one-minute poll frequency. You can monitor your websites from over 110 locations. For this price, you get one “advanced” monitor, too. Examples of advanced monitors are multi-step web transactions, mail delivery monitoring, and web page speed checks.

Infrastructure monitoring starts at $10/month for 10 websites/servers/cloud apps. Infrastructure monitoring offers over 60 performance metrics on your servers and supports everything from Windows, Linux, Hyper-V, and VMWare to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

Alternatively, Site24x7 offers application performance monitoring (APM), starting at $39/month for three applications and 40 websites/servers/cloud apps. You can monitor all your Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP, .NET, and Node.js applications and get performance metrics on throughput, response times, and errors.

All-in-one plans are available for $39–$499/month. These include a mixture of website, network, infrastructure, and application monitoring features.

Navigate the complex pricing structure and you’ll find Site24x7 does offer some great pricing. On average, you’re looking at around $1/server/month. 

Features

Like other Zoho products, Site24x7’s design philosophy is to give you everything but the kitchen sink, all in one umbrella product. It’s a Swiss-army knife for monitoring all your websites, infrastructure, and applications.

Website Monitoring

Website monitoring is just one of the hundreds of monitors you can set up on Site24x7 (Image credit: Zoho)

Website monitoring

With Site24x7 website monitoring, you can continually check the performance of your services. It can be used to monitor your website’s uptime and page speed and alert you when your sites are unavailable. You can analyze web page speed and identity specific assets that might be slowing things down.

Real User Monitoring

Setting up real user monitoring involves adding some JavaScript to the header of the pages you want to monitor (Image credit: Zoho)

User experience monitoring

By adding code to your web pages, you can proactively test the response time and functionality of the entire user journey.

Site24x7 offers both synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring of the user experience, so you can simulate common navigation paths (e.g., from login to payment gateway) or monitor performance data for real users to find bottlenecks.

Server Monitoring

Site24x7 supports almost all major servers, cloud infrastructure, and applications in use today (Image credit: Zoho)

Server monitoring

With server monitoring, you can see how your servers are performing at all times with up to 60 metrics. There are also over 100 plugins so you can monitor software like Apache and MySQL, and both Windows and Linux servers are supported. 

You can even set up automation that responds to alerts by performing actions. For example, if a server’s memory usage hits 99%, send an alert text message, run a few server scripts, and reboot the server.

Interface

Site24x7’s context-sensitive help is useful when first setting up your monitors (Image credit: Zoho)

Interface and in use

Setting up and administering your Site24x7 monitors is performed through the web interface. It’s a perfunctory interface with long forms for each type of monitor, and the sheer number of options could intimidate new users.

Site24x7 is squarely aimed at DevOps managers who need little hand-holding. Having said that, each page has useful context-sensitive help available that outlines what each of the configuration options does. 

Training

Site24x7 often runs free multi-day training seminars (Image credit: Zoho)

Support

Besides the context-sensitive help discussed above, Site24x7 has multiple resources for learning how to use the tool to your advantage. There’s a blog, community, help documentation, API, white papers, and webinars.  Site24x7 often runs free five-day courses, and there’s even a certification program.

Customer support is available via email, phone (US, UK, Australia, and the Netherlands), and live chat. We got fast, polite responses each time we used the live chat support.

The competition

Site24x7 has a focus on monitoring your own websites and services. It can’t be used to monitor the web at large. For this, we recommend Visualping. Visualping’s paid plans start at $13/month and allow you to monitor the web for mentions of your brand, check competitor sites for changes, and track your search engine rankings, besides many other use cases.

If you are looking for an alternative to Site24x7 for monitoring your own websites, Pingdom is a valid choice at a similar price point. Site24x7 is more flexible and offers more features, but we prefer Pingdom’s interface, and it has better integration with third-party web apps.

Final verdict

Site24x7 is easily one of the best options out there for monitoring your own websites and infrastructure. We’ve only scratched the surface here in discussing the different monitors one can set up, and pricing is great, particularly as the number of services you need to check increases.

If you need website change monitoring software for competitor research or reputation management, look elsewhere, though, as Site24x7 is only for monitoring your own services. It’s also a bit unwieldy for smaller businesses only looking to monitor one or two websites or servers.

But for monitoring an enterprise of websites, servers, and applications, Site24x7 may be the best choice available today.

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