Partner post: Why you need monitoring

Authored by Bartek Jazwinski, Product Manager at WebPros.

Monitoring of web assets is an important part of business operations, as it helps businesses mitigate risks and reduce downtime. So what risks can be addressed by monitoring your web assets and Droplets/virtual machines, and what opportunities are there to counter them? In this guest post from DigitalOcean partner WebPros, makers of 360 Monitoring, we explore this topic.

Risk of losing money

First of all, downtime is expensive. For example, if you manage or own a website with $1M annual revenue, a basic calculation of revenue per hour shows you could lose over $100 of turnover every hour when your website is down. 

Of course, what needs to be also counted are lost customers, lost credibility, and the cost of the team working on getting the website working again. With monitoring, you can prevent your company from facing these issues.

Opportunity for you

Focus on scaling your business instead of putting down fires. You can increase the profit margin by upselling premium uptime reports if you maintain projects for your customers. 

Risk of losing customers 

Another essential aspect of customer relations is learning about a problem before the customer notices it. There’s nothing worse than getting a call from angry customers complaining about a website outage that you overlooked. Monitoring is like an insurance policy for the continuity of your business and your relationship with your customers. 

Opportunity for you

Retain your customers by improving their satisfaction level. The happier they are, the bigger chance they will recommend you in their networks. 

Risk of damaging your brand image 

To ensure that your project works well, you need to be constantly aware of what’s going on at the website or app and Droplet/virtual machine level. For example, an outdated SSL certificate can flag your website or webshop as not secure enough. Also, keep in mind that the validity period of certificates, which you need to renew after each certificate, is getting shorter and shorter.

If you use Cloudflare, another thing to keep an eye on is to ensure that your project’s Cloudflare status is available. Finally, the loading time from different locations is also an important metric for you, as it can affect the user experience and the page ranking. 

Opportunity for you

Keep your good image. Be sure your projects are always secure, and that you’re perceived as a top-quality service provider. 

Why is simple availability monitoring not enough?

Whatever you host on your virtual machine, be it a website, app, mailbox, or database, performance is highly dependent on the health and status of the instance.

In addition to basic information like CPU load, memory usage, or disk space, you also need to monitor other metrics closely. For example, whether Apache or Nginx is working according to expectations or whether MySQL is not overloaded. It’s common for a website’s lack of performance to be caused by a query that runs every time the website is visited, overloading MySQL.

If you only monitor availability, all you know is that the website is slow. With a comprehensive tool that monitors both the site and the virtual machine, you’ll also know what’s causing it. Especially if the service you’re using notifies you before the problem occurs. For example, instead of warning you that the disk is running out of space, it tells you in advance that it is 80% full, so you should consider upgrading or cleaning it up.

What other features should you consider while choosing a monitoring tool?

Website quality check

Uptime and loading speed are not the only factors that affect the performance of your website. With a good monitoring tool, you can also check the quality of your website. Usually, it scans your website and looks for problems such as large files, JavaScript errors, broken links, missing images, and resources. You will receive a notification immediately in case of detecting any of these problems. 

Integrations

Monitoring is not just about websites or virtual machines, but also about an app, Discord servers, or anything else you can imagine. That’s why choosing a tool that offers you many integrations is essential. It’s even better if it allows you to write custom plugins, so you can be sure to integrate them with anything you want. 

This way, you’ll be able to precisely monitor the metrics that are most important to you and display them consistently and comprehensively.

Blocklist Monitoring Feature

If your IP address is listed on Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBL), your emails will end up in SPAM or will not arrive at all. That’s why it’s important that you learn about such an event quickly and react accordingly.

Without automated blocklist monitoring, you are forced to check your IPs on every RBL on the web manually and can never be sure whether it is listed or not. 

Logfile Monitoring 

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, a problem occurs. If the monitoring tool you are using allows you to monitor log files, you can analyze them to determine the cause of the problem. 

Notification Channels 

You want to be quickly informed about any problem in your project or Droplet. However, it’s essential that the tool you choose integrates with the most popular messaging services, such as Slack, Discord, Telegram, and good old text messaging.

To learn more about DigitalOcean partner Plesk, read our case study.