Monitoring and alerts — observability of a website
Artem Rudenko
CEO, Founder
A website is a relatively simple piece of software — the feature set and level of interactivity is not that high. That said, there is still something to monitor, to make sure users are getting the right experience. This post will dive into the aspects of a website that you should consider monitoring.
Is it up and running?
The simplest and most important check is to ensure your website is available to serve traffic. You should check that frontend assets are being served correctly, and that the backend server is responding. If the website is down, your visitors obviously won't be able to visit it. This can do severe damage to your reputation. To mitigate this risk, downtime should be monitored, and your team should be notified immediately.
Some tools to consider using are:
Some uptime monitoring services allow you to make your website's current status and uptime history available publicly. This is helpful when your website expose any service which your users rely on.
Are there broken pages?
It's important to track missing pages as well. Missing pages can arise when an update removed a page while there are still links pointing to it. There may also be broken links that aren't the result of a page being removed. A useful tool in this space is Sitechecker's 404 error monitoring 
.
If your site implements custom features, there can also be JavaScript errors. These script errors can effectively break a page, blocking the user from interacting with it, or showing irrelevant content. There are many error tracking tools available, including Sentry and Datadog Real User Monitoring . These two tools are rather advanced and may become expensive, so keep track of your bills.
Tracking behavior metrics
In addition to tracking whether your website is functioning properly from a technical perspective, you should also track if the UI/UX is having the desired effect on user behavior. These UI/UX concerns should be tracked separately from technical issues. Useful metrics in this space to track are:
- Time on page
- Drop-off rate
- Scrolling distance
This data gives you insight into how users perceive the design and content of the website. The metrics can help detect regressions in UI and UX — something designers should address.
Useful tools for tracking behavior metrics are Datadog Real User Monitoring and Hotjar .
Monitor only what you need
At the end of the day, you should carefully choose what to monitor, since implementing monitoring of some aspects of your website's performance may not be an effective use of time. Be even more careful about which alerts to enable. Having too many alerts quickly turns into indistinguishable noise and alert fatigue, resulting in the team ignoring most alerts. This can cause a truly important alert to go unnoticed.