IPHost Network Monitor is able to make use of all the mentioned tools and techniques to detect performance and/or accessibility degradation of a Web site.
To illustrate how HTTP monitoring is done, let's create a test monitor within IP Host Monitor. To start, click on 'New Monitor' button, select 'HTTP(S)' and click 'Next':
Enter URL of the site to watch, say http://amazon.com/:
Now the newly created monitor appears in the left pane. Click on it and let's do some tuning
You can change 'Notes' in Monitor section, to have detailed title in the reports you'll receive, but first of all let's set poll time in Dependency and Polling Interval section. It's hardly useful to test it too often, since the page loaded is highly dynamic and may be not too quick to load over busy networks. Let's set it to 600 seconds.
Further, in Monitor Definition we can use string matching to effectively cause failure condition, to test alerts. Visit Amazon site and choose any non-obvious string from Amazon Daily Blog, say EyeClops. Now set 'Response Validation' dropdown to 'Match String' and in the field below print the string to watch for, "EyeClops" (without quotes).
In the Action section set action to whatever means of alert notification you wish.
Now let's change the defaults in Availability Monitoring and Performance Monitoring sections. The site may load not too quickly, so let's set Down State Timeout to 20 seconds, Performance Warning level to 5 seconds and Performance Alert level to 10 seconds.
That's all, for a start. Now right-click on the monitor in the left pane and click on 'Start'. Watch the initial messages in the Log view.
...now let's return to this monitor in 20 minutes or a bit later and inspect the Logs:
You have just created your first monitor using IPHost Network Monitor software.
