Beyond monitoring

The basics

Internal v external monitoring

Internal monitoring: monitoring via your own internal network.

Internal monitoring of your web servers and web services is a good place to start, but unless all your users are "internal" to your network, internal monitoring does not give you an idea of what the user experience is like. Internal monitoring will not reveal any issues with external connections.

External monitoring

External monitoring: monitoring via an external network as a user.

External monitoring provides a big jump in functionality over purely internal monitoring. It gives an accurate idea of user experience because it measures all aspects of user interaction including server and network speed, DNS resolution, server and network reliability.

Anti-hacking and anti-defacement monitoring

DNS monitoring

When a user goes to your website, the first thing their computer does is resolve your domain name into an IP address. This process involves the user's computer querying (typically) its ISP's name server. DNS monitoring can alert you if any of the following occurs: 

• re-delegation of your domain name; or
• domain name hijacking;

Re-delegation

Issues with re-delegation can occur when:

• you forget to renew your domain name registration and lose your domain name;
• a hacker obtains your registry key;
• an administrator legitimately re-delegates (but does so incorrectly);
• the domain name registry you use is hacked.

Anti-defacement monitoring

When Remmon monitors a webpage, it can alert you if:

• the contents of the page has changed;
• if the page stops containing a keyword or phrase;
• if the page contains a keyword or phrase.

Information leakage

Its good commercial business practice to keep customer usage information private.  Who your customers are, when they visit your website and what they look at may be critical information for your business.  However, by inadvertently including externally hosted third party resources in your webpages, you may be giving this information away to third parties and placing it beyond your control.

Remmon can monitor and alert you if such information leakage is occuring.