What is a Monitor?
A full-stack IT monitoring tool should have the ability to correctly identify all potential choke-points in your IT infrastructure. Site24x7 offers you great flexibility to test your IT resources with the help of Monitors. Monitors allow you to proactively examine availability and various performance trends of your endpoints, internet resources, servers, network resources, cloud resources, VMs, applications and more. Every monitor has unique parameters that must be closely tracked to stay on top of any performance issues. For example, a server monitor constantly tracks critical metrics like CPU, memory, disk utilization, network utilization, event logs, and process metrics to stay away from any outages. Likewise, a website monitor tracks metrics like throughput and response time with detailed first byte time, last byte time, DNS resolution time, and SSL handshake time split-up.
Site24x7 licensing and pricing works based on the type of monitor. Monitors are classified as:
Basic Monitors
Website Monitoring
- Website (HTTP/HTTPS)
- DNS Server, Ping, FTP Server, SMTP Server
- SSL/TLS Certificate, Domain Expiry Monitoring
- SOAP Web Service, REST API Monitoring
- Port (Custom Protocol), POP Server Monitoring
Server Monitoring (charged based on servers and not individual metrics)
- Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X Monitoring (agent based)
- Microsoft IIS Monitoring
- Windows Server Backup Monitoring
- Each VMware VM Instance (VMWare monitoring using On-Premise Poller)
- VMware ESX Hosts
- Cron and Heartbeat Monitoring
- Docker Monitoring
- VMware Datastore Monitoring
Azure Monitoring
- Each resource is considered one basic monitor.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Monitoring
- Each service/resource is considered one basic monitor.
Amazon Web Services Monitoring
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) per instance
- Relational Database Service (RDS) per instance
- DynamoDB per table
- SNS per topic
- ELB per node (Classic, Application or Network)
- S3 Bucket and S3 object endpoint (after free limits)
- CloudFront Distribution
- SQS Queue
- Kinesis Data Stream, Kinesis Firehose Delivery Stream, Kinesis Analytics Application or Kinesis Video Stream
- Elastic Beanstalk environment
- Direct Connect connection
- AWS Managed VPN
- API Gateway Stage or API Gateway Resource
- ECS Cluster or ECS Cluster Service
- Redshift cluster or Redshift node
- Elastic File System
- Simple Email Service endpoint
- Step Function state machine
- Lambda function
- ElastiCache Memcached cluster, ElastiCache Memcached node, or ElastiCache Redis node
- WAF web ACL
- Customer managed KMS CMK
- CloudSearch Service Domain
- Route 53 or 10 Hosted Zone records
- Elasticsearch Service Domain
Advanced Monitors
- Web Transaction
- Web Transaction (Browser)
- Web Transaction (Browser) - Selenium WebDriver
- FTP Transfer
- Mail Delivery
- Web Page Speed (Browser)
- Website Defacement
- APM-Insight-Instance
- Microsoft BizTalk Monitoring
- Microsoft SharePoint Monitoring
- Microsoft Office 365 Monitoring
- Microsoft Active Directory (AD) Monitoring
- Microsoft Exchange Monitoring
- Microsoft Hyper-V Monitoring
- Microsoft SQL Monitoring
- Microsoft Failover Cluster Monitoring
Some of the key facets of a Site24x7 Monitors are listed below:
- You can monitor any internet facing resource using our agentless monitors. Monitoring is enabled from 90+ locations globally or behind the firewall using On-Premises Poller.
- You can monitor local URLs, ports, processes using the server monitoring agents. In this case, each Server is considered as a monitor. You can also monitor all resources in that server using the same Site24x7 server agent.
- We typically charge for a host and IP combination. For example, a server is charged as one basic monitor, which monitors servers, processes, syslogs, other resources on the server including URL, port, NFS, files, directories and more at no additional cost. Each monitor comes with one plugin on the server. Likewise, for VMware, we charge by virtual machines.
- A server monitor also includes monitoring applications or services using our ready-to-use plugin integrations or your own plugin that you can build. We do not charge you extra for this. Each plugin comes with 25 custom metrics, by default. Also, one plugin is free/server. Additional plugin on server will be accounted as one additional basic monitor.
- Some Microsoft apps supported out-of-the box are charged extra. Microsoft IIS is considered as a basic monitor. Microsoft Sharepoint, Office 365, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Biztalk, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Failover Cluster, Microsoft AD are licensed as advanced monitors.
- Licensing for network monitoring is purely based on the number of interfaces that are monitored. It is mandatory to have at least one active interface in order to monitor a device. While ten performance counters per device can be monitored for free, every additional ten is counted as one interface.
- Each AWS instance is considered as a monitor.
- For internet services monitoring, you can monitor from up to 16 locations. We use a predictable polling from a location logic so that graphs are uniform and intelligible. Other vendors use a round-robin methodology which gives too many spikes between polls because of latency differences due to different geographical conditions. Different sets of 16 locations can be selected from our list of 90+ geographical locations to monitor various internet monitors.
- The Elite, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus Web Plans support monitoring from 16 locations.
- The amount of uploadable logs varies with the licensing plan for Site24x7 AppLogs.
- Licensing example: Say you have to monitor two physical servers running your website and its back-end. In total, you would need three basic monitors. Two monitors for viewing detailed CPU, memory, disk performance information of your critical servers and one monitor for checking the website's domain itself.
