Track Your Website Status using Monitor.us

There are many server status notification tools available in the net nowadays. The latest which I encountered is Monitor.us. Monitor.us is a handy website which helps you track the status of the servers. After signup you can add test for your servers. It supports 11 protocols for testing namely http, ping, https, ftp, pop, smtp, dns, tcp, udp, imap, and sip. You can have the server performance data displayed in any of the three formats – Table, Bar and Line. You can opt in to receive notification about your site problem via email, Instant Messenger (ICQ, Yahoo, MSN or Google) or SMS (this at this moment is a paid service). You can also create an alert feed to be read in your RSS reader about your server status.

The USP for Monitor.us is that even though it is primarily a server status tracking tool, it can be used effectively to track information about visitors to your site. You can add your website for visitor tracking, after that you have to insert a small JavaScript code into your site. You can track your traffic on the basis of countries, IPs, cities, OS, Browsers, and Keywords. The interface for the visitor tracking is beautiful, especially the Map, you can zoom in and out the map to track countries and cities. Another wonderful feature which is available is the Widget option – You can create embeddable widget to track your server performance. Another feature – Snapshot, help you in tracking all your server status quickly. Even with all these wonderful features, their service has enough annoyance for a person. I am constantly irritated with their display interface – if you opt for adding a display let’s say a visitor tracking display, it only keeps showing Loading… You will be able to see it only after refreshing the page. The worst is while trying to add visitor tracking, when I added the URL for tracking it kept on showing verifying URL and never gave me the Code snippet. No need to panic here, you just have to refresh the page and add the visitor tracking from My VT Sites. You can find the code snippet in the Traffic Report box add it to your site, bingo it starts working. For all these annoyance Monitor.us is a wonderful tool, it brings all the right application and service together to make it handy for the webmaster. I would like them to provide a comprehensive Help document (as I believe the current one is adequate) to enhance user experience. The help document should include the difference between different protocols and all the technical terms included with their services. At this moment this tool is a bit complex for a person who is a beginner as far net technicalities are concerned.