Throughout the last decades, governments all over the world have enacted laws, regulations, policies, directives, and procurement standards referring to web site monitoring and accessibility. There are quite a few examples of such acts, such as the Australian Disability Discrimination Act 1992, the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, the American with Disabilities (ADA) Section 508, and the British Disability Discrimination Act and many others.

Website monitoring services attempt to connect your web, FTP, NNTP, or SMTP server to regular intervals. If the application is unable to connect and confirm operational status it will retry based on customer defined timeout and retry levels. Remote website monitoring services are performed outside the organizational IT infrastructure the same way as anyone can accesses your web, FTP, NNTP, or SMTP server. Thus, you will rest assured that your web site is still available to visitors as far as the service delivery is concerned. Generally, remote monitoring packages offer the possibility of verifying specific "keywords" against the page retrieved. In most cases the keywords are case sensitive and can include various words or phrases up to approximately 50 characters in length. The main purpose of the web site monitoring feature is to verify whether your site has been hacked or defaced. Monitoring service packages generally offer the possibility of page analysis performance and verification as far as web sites and FPT servers are concerned.

Website monitoring can refer to application, server, service or Web URL, their performance being monitored on the basis of metrics like CPU Usage, Response Time etc. Thus, in case you wish to monitor 100 SQL Server installations in your network, the 100 SQL Servers will be considered as 100 monitors. The total number of monitors includes the monitors that have been added by default. The default monitors are generally not taken into account while calculating the number of monitors for Licensing as the CPU Utilization, Response Time etc. are considered to be the Performance Metrics of a Server Monitor.

Web site monitoring involves the following applications:

URL Monitoring / Web site Monitoring ? refers to the monitoring of the availability and performance of web pages. The applications manager verifies if the web pages are accessible. In case they are not accessible the client is being notified so that corrective actions can be triggered. This web site monitoring feature verifies several attributes like response time, etc. One may set a threshold for a web page, thus if the page load time is exceeds, say 5 seconds, notification will be sent via e-mail or SMS. This helps the client to take quick action before end users can be affected. Successful page retrieval informs you that the web server is functioning properly and the URL monitoring helps you verify whether CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts and back-end databases are functioning properly.

URL Sequence Monitoring - The URL Sequence provides multiple web page monitoring of online applications. It verifies pages with dynamically generated information, enhancing interactive transactions like logging into a login page, creating an account using a web form, and instructing the application to perform some action. This type of website monitoring requires a specific URL that is followed by additional links in it. The monitoring performs end-to-end verification of specific transactions. This feature is quite useful for e-commerce websites that provide several forms that need to be filled-in by users. You can perform URL sequence monitoring in order to observe what is returned at each step of a URL sequence. Thus, you have the possibility of performing quicker troubleshooting by identifying which page in the sequence is creating the problem.

URL Content Monitoring / Website Content Monitoring - is for web pages that are dynamically generated and display statistics about custom applications. This type of website monitoring ensures that the pages are not modified without your approval. This feature is important for those who struggle to maintain the validity of the data on their web sites.