Network Monitoring for Serious eCommerce
Businesses come in variety of sizes, from the self-employed entrepreneurs to the giants such as Wal-Mart. Similarly, on the internet, online companies come in all sizes. From a small stand-alone e-book web portal with the webmaster and owner roll into one, to a goliath like Amazon, with millions of pages of book listing, requiring a considerable number of webmasters maintaining it.
If your site is a single page, it is its own network. But if your site is any bigger, and you have plans to grow, it is a network or is fast becoming one. You need network monitoring.
Most webmasters that use ecommerce applications are familiar with website monitoring. Many of them also use a website monitoring service or software to keep track of their “uptime” and “downtime”.
To manage a shopping mall in your local area, the management will need more than just knowing when to open the front doors and when to close them. Similarly, to have a serious ecommerce website, you’ll need to know more than just when the site is accessible. And that is when network monitoring comes in.
The odds are, your e-business will have own, or use one of the following remotely, and they are just some of the list of items that may need to be monitored,
DNS Servers:
A system of servers that stores and associates many types of information with domain names, but, most importantly, it translates domain names (computer hostnames) to IP addresses.
FTP Server:
File Transfer Protocol Servers, commonly used to help in the exchanging of files over any remote users. Monitoring services available for FTP can make sure that it’s always up and running.
POP3 and SMTP Servers:
Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). SMTP is used to transfer electronic mails between servers, and POP3 is used to retrieve the mails from the local server into the inbox. If there are errors occurring in these servers, i.e. the servers’ down, no mails can be transferred, which will in turn leaves be a costly factor in your business. The only thing preventing such a disaster is to have an external monitoring system.
Firewalls:
A system designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network. Firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranets. If in any event, the firewall crashes any attempt to connect the internet will fail and vice versa.
Internet Connections: Users accessing to your network come from a multiple variety of backbones, depending on their location and ISP providers. It is vital to ensure access to your network is optimal to not only a select few, but also the majority of them. Remote monitoring system can help you in achieving those results by ping-ing your networks to multiple locations around the globe, thus allowing you to test most major internet traffic coming to and fro your web server.
Most websites of any size and functionality nowadays are a complete network, and many of these networks rely on servers in different parts of the world. To ensure that these networks function with minimal of glitches, a good monitoring service is needed.
What is needed to be monitored may probably vary depending on how extensive the network is. A network monitoring consultant can help in determining what needs to be monitored. If your network is personally owned by you, or if it’s hosted under dedicated servers, then you’ll most likely need to monitor everything. However, if your site is hosted on shared servers, you may only need a few functions to have it run properly.
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