The Best Internet Monitoring Software

An organization’s website is its shopfront online and as organizations scale, their websites become more connected with their computer network for an increasing amount of API calls, be it for e-commerce or support calls.

Any weaknesses in your network could result in delays of failures on your website and result in losses. Internet connections can be unstable and become single points of failure in your network.

You can keep on top of these failure conditions with an internet connection monitor that continuously monitors your internet and network connections.

Here is our list of the best internet monitoring software:

1. Datadog Proactive Uptime Monitoring EDITOR’S CHOICE A network monitoring service that is delivered from the cloud and so is able to measure traffic flows on any network and even between two points on the internet. Access the 14-day free trial.
2. Site24x7 Website Monitoring (FREE TRIAL) This package of monitoring systems watches over the performance of internet connections and implements real-user monitoring to check on website performance statistics. Start a 30-day free trial.
3. Paessler Internet Monitoring with PRTG (FREE TRIAL) A three-in-one network, server, and application monitor. This monitoring platform is a collection of individual monitors that the user can customize by selecting which sensors to turn on. Download 30-day free trial.
4. Obkio (FREE TRIAL) This cloud-based system is able to test connections across LANs and also between sites over the internet by measuring activity between two data collection agents. Start a 14-day free trial.
5. SolarWinds Pingdom Delivers cloud-based website performance monitoring that combines synthetic and real-user monitoring to give you invaluable performance insights. It is easy to use and provides a full-stack application monitoring experience which is great for troubleshooting issues.
6. Outages.io A hybrid network monitoring system with a cloud-based control panel and a choice of hardware or software onsite monitors.
7. NodePing A subscription-based cloud service that can monitor up to 250 networks per customer.
8. Uptrends A web monitor that includes response time reporting alerts. This service is based in the cloud.
9. Dynatrace A SaaS system monitoring tool that covers all network statuses onsite as well as response times to a website.
10. Uptime Robot A website availability monitor that will measure response times to a site as well as its uptime.
11. Uptime A monitor for networks, servers, and applications that focuses on the availability and response times of resources.
12. StatusCake Measures the availability and response times of a given website from 28 locations around the world.

Monitoring services

When you are checking to make sure that your site is being delivered at an acceptable speed, you need to monitor several factors. So, look for a tool that will give you the user perspective and will check through several pages on your site rather than one that will just ping your Home page.

Most of the tools in this list are provided on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. That means that they take no time to set up and they are incredibly easy to use. You don’t need to keep updating this software and you don’t need to worry about which point on your network is the best place to install the tool.

Scaling your monitor

An advantage of Cloud-based services is that they charge on a subscription basis and most of them offer several different plans. That means that you can choose a plan that is suitable for your size of business. If you have only one website with a few pages, you don’t want to have to pay for the same service that is tailored to large businesses with many websites. The great thing about these services is that they will allow you to upgrade your plan as your business grows.

When you look for an internet monitoring tool you should check that it fits your business size while also making sure that the tool covers all of the performance factors that you need to monitor on your website.

Web transaction monitoring

Web transaction monitoring is an important task in eCommerce. It doesn’t matter how great your product, service, or information is, if the delivery of your web pages is poor, your hard work is wasted. No one has time to grapple with failures in your site when there are plenty of rival websites to visit instead.

You might find that your hosting service is at fault or you might find that elements in your site, which have great presentational value, are damaging the overall user experience of visitors by making pages too slow to load. Monitoring is one element of making your site function successfully, design decisions and infrastructure investment will also contribute to the successful delivery of your web pages.

The best Internet Monitoring Software

There are many options out there when you are in the market for an internet service monitor. It would take you a long time to assess each of these tools, so we have done the legwork for you. In this guide, you will narrow down your search so you can save time and focus on the best options.

You can read more about each of these tools in the following sections.

1. Datadog Proactive Uptime Monitoring (FREE TRIAL)

The Datadog Proactive Uptime Monitoring module is part of a suite of cloud-based IT resource management tools. This module specializes in examining the network traffic on local or remote networks. It is also able to measure the performance of links between networks and also connections through to cloud resources, thus, it can measure internet connection performance.

Key Features:

• Network Mapping and User Interfaces: Features some of the best network mapping and user interfaces on the market, enhancing usability and visualization of network performance.
• Validate HTTP Requests: Ensures the accuracy and performance of web services by validating HTTP requests, providing a more comprehensive monitoring solution than simple ping checks.
• Monitor and Maintain SLAs: Helps businesses monitor and maintain Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure consistent service quality.
• Front-end and Root-Cause Analysis: Offers detailed front-end monitoring and root-cause analysis to quickly identify and resolve performance issues.
• Real-Time Metrics: Provides real-time monitoring with metrics, traces, and logs to offer a complete view of system performance and issues.

Why do we recommend it?

Datadog Proactive Uptime Monitoring is part of the cloud-based Network Performance Monitoring service of the Datadog platform. This package allows you to check connections over a network and on the internet. It can also perform end-to-end monitoring of a path that crosses both a local network and also the internet – also perhaps onto another network.

The service requires an agent program to be installed on the monitored network. Thus, in order to see live information about traffic flows across the internet, the systems administrator would need to install the agent on at least two sites. Another method of measuring internet connections with the Network Performance Monitoring unit would be to place an agent on a cloud server and then an in-house host.

The agent will scan all traffic to identify all of the devices connected to the network and this activity enables the monitor to maintain a live topology map of the network and a device inventory. If agents are placed on several sites, the internet links between them will also be integrated into the network topology maps.

All of the data processing of this monitor takes place on the Datadog server – the agent is a data collector that feeds into those processes. The console is resident on the cloud server and customers gain access to it through any standard browser. The network performance screens show live traffic flow data and Datadog also stores statistics so that performance over timer can be analyzed.

The analysis features of the Network Performance Monitor enable network managers to plan capacity for expected demand both on private networks and in terms of an internet service agreement.

Who is it recommended for?

The Network Performance Monitor is a good tool for any business that runs its own network. The abilities of this tool enable the tracking of network performance over the internet between sites or to cloud servers. So, businesses that have multiple sites or use SaaS packages extensively would need this monitoring service.

Datadog charges for the Network Performance monitoring tool by subscription. The company offers a rate per month and a cheaper rate per year. In both cases, the subscriber pays per host. offers a 14-day free trial.

2. Site24x7 Website Monitoring (FREE TRIAL)

Site24x7 Website Monitoring is delivered from the cloud and can check on the performance metrics of your internet assets from more than 120 locations. Synthetic monitoring tools perform availability and load speed tests at regular intervals, logging the results of each test cycle.

Key Features:

• Real-time Website Monitoring: Site24x7 continuously checks website uptime and performance from over 60+ locations globally and can simulate user interactions to test the functionality of web applications.
• Security Monitoring: Includes security monitoring features that detect and remove infections, helping to protect the website from malware and other security threats.
• Performance Insights: Provides detailed reports on various metrics such as response time, throughput, and status codes, which help in pinpointing the causes of performance degradation.
• Alerting System: The platform has an efficient alerting mechanism that notifies administrators via email, SMS, or integrations like Slack when performance anomalies or downtimes are detected.
• Automated Tests: Performs automated tests to continuously monitor website performance and availability.

Why do we recommend it?

Site24x7 Website Monitoring is a package of monitoring services that are hosted on a cloud platform. The combination of services in this bundle allows you to get full stack observability into your websites, identifying exactly which component of your system is at fault if your websites perform badly.

The Website Monitoring package gives you a subscription model in which you pre-pay for a monthly allowance of tests. There are four plans available and the number of tests included in each package increases with the plan price. When you set up a performance test. You can specify the frequency and the test launch location and then leave the cycle running. You also define performance expectations and if one of those thresholds is breached, you will receive an alert.

Performance alerts can be sent to you as notifications via email, SMS, push notification, voice call, or RSS feed. The system can also be linked to project and team management tools, such as Jira, Teams, and ManageEngine Service Desk Plus to get issue tracking and task allocation routing.

Services within the Website Monitoring package include the identification of attempts at unauthorized changes to the site’s code, malware infection detection, SSL certificate monitoring, blocklist checks, and domain registration validity. You can also get reports on the volume of visitors and ensure that your Web server has sufficient capacity to cope.

Real-user monitoring services log the locations of visitors and the volume of throughput per page. See which paths through your site prove more popular and which pages are neglected. As well as being shown live in the Site24x7 dashboard, all of these statistics are logged for historical analysis.

Who is it recommended for?

The combination of tools in the Site24x7 package provides constant availability monitoring for a website or for internet links between sites. Therefore businesses that run websites, have multiple sites, or use cloud services extensively need this package.

Each of the four plans for Site24x7 Website Monitoring offers a set number of credits for each type of service. You can increase any of these allowances for an additional fee. Try out the Site24x7 cloud platform with a 30-day free trial.

Site24x7 Website Monitoring Start 30-day FREE Trial

3. Paessler Internet Monitoring with PRTG (FREE TRIAL)

Paessler PRTG monitoring tool covers network, server, and application monitoring. The utility includes many different sensors. Each sensor is actually a separate monitoring program. The menu of available monitors includes the ability to check on your site’s availability from several locations around the globe. These tests give you a live view of internet access speeds for your site. So, you can see how long it takes members of the public to get to your site anytime during the day.

Key Features:

• Website Response Times: Monitors and reports on the response times of websites to ensure optimal performance.
• Connection Speed Monitoring: Tracks and evaluates connection speeds to identify potential issues affecting website performance.
• Performance Alerts: Sends alerts regarding performance issues to keep teams informed and proactive.
• Full Infrastructure Stack Monitoring: Monitors the entire infrastructure stack, including websites, networks, applications, and user activity.
• Integrated Monitoring: The same platform can be used to set up internal monitoring of networks, applications, and user activity, providing a unified monitoring solution.

The internet monitoring tool has the Ping function at its heart. So, if your internet service suddenly stops working, you will know right away and be able to take action. As well as seeing a line graph of access times from three different locations, you will be able to set the system to notify you when the internet service performance drops. These notifications can be delivered by email, SMS, or pager alert.

The PRTG internet monitor checks on more than just site availability. You can also use the tool to ensure that all elements of the site are loading properly. You can also use the tool to check on the real user experience, performing a run-through of the full buyer path from an initial visit to a purchase. This enables you to check that database access is efficient and that your shopping cart software is working properly.

The monitoring capabilities of PRTG are not restricted to your own website. You can also check other sites on the internet. Thus, you will be able to compare the response times of your site compared to rival sites.

Why do we recommend it?

Paessler PRTG is a very large bundle of monitoring tools for all types of IT systems. This bundle includes Ping and TraceRoute services that can track issues on internet connections between your sites or from your LAN out to a cloud platform.

The PRTG package includes a lot of monitoring utilities. Problems with your website response times might not be caused by your internet service. Server and application performance, and also internal network response times can impact on-site delivery times. With the full PRTG system, you can check for the cause of any internet response time problems and drill through your system to find the exact cause of the fault.

Overall PRTG is great for monitoring internet availability and performance because it blends monitors for networks, servers, and applications. Websites involve every level of the stack and so problems with internet performance can have any of a long list of causes. Paessler PRTG includes features such as stack visualizations that make it clear where the source of a performance problem lies. PRTG is customizable and the customer only pays for those monitors that are activated.

Who is it recommended for?

The very large number of monitors in the PRTG package would only be suitable for large businesses. However, you don’t have to turn all of the sensors on and you only pay for the number of sensors that you use. Therefore mid-sized and small businesses pay much less than the full price. Small businesses that only access 100 sensors never have to pay for PRTG.

You can get a 30-day free trial with all sensors available. Paessler charges for PRTG in service-level bundles. Each charging band is calculated on the number of sensors that you activate.

Paessler PRTG Download 30-day FREE Trial

See also: Best Uptime Monitoring Tools

4. Obkio (FREE TRIAL)

Obkio is a cloud-based network performance monitoring tool designed to help businesses continuously monitor internet and network performance across multiple locations. It provides real-time visibility into network health, enabling organizations to detect, diagnose, and resolve performance issues. Obkio focuses on user experience, allowing IT teams to monitor the network from the end-user perspective, helping to quickly identify bottlenecks and service interruptions.

Key Features:

• End-to-End Network Monitoring: Examines both the end-user and service provider perspectives.
• Real-Time Data: Provides real-time data on network performance, latency, packet loss, and jitter.
• Historical Insights: Stores metrics to analyze historical trends for troubleshooting and optimization.

Why do we recommend it?

Obkio provides real-time insights into performance issues that directly impact end-user experience. It delivers intuitive reporting, and excels in multi-site monitoring, making it ideal for businesses with complex or distributed networks. Obkio helps ensure that IT teams can proactively address network bottlenecks, improving uptime and user satisfaction without waiting for problems to be reported.

The system’s architecture involves the installation of data collection agents. These use SNMP, Traceroute, and Ping to monitor the connections between them. The more agents you install, the more paths you can monitor. The service shows the results of these tests in its cloud-hosted dashboard and troubleshooting tests can also be run on demand.

While gathering statistics for live monitoring the Obkio system will store data. This can be recalled for historical analysis. Network managers can examine network conditions when known device issues arose and also summarize data for capacity planning.

The Obkio monitors can observe internet links out to cloud services or between sites. This can be used to support a virtual network, such as a SASE or an SD-WAN. Another use for Obkio’s internet performance monitoring is to check on the delivery of internet service quality and availability from an ISP.

Obkio is able to track the metrics that are important to VoIP systems. These include Quality of Service statistics and Mean Opinion Score. Get alerts when network traffic displays unacceptable levels of lag, jitter, or packet loss. Alerts will appear in the dashboard and you can set the system up so that it forwards those warnings to technicians by email, Slack, Teams, or Pagerduty.

Who is it recommended for?

This internet monitoring capabilities of Obkio are going to interest multi-site businesses and companies that use cloud serivves. The system can be used to check on the quality of internet delivered under an ISP contract. It is also useful for checking on the pattern of traffic to and from a Web server and it will provide QoS statistics for VoIP connections.

Obkio measures traffic between two data collection agents. So, you can make it an internet monitoring system by installing agents in two locations or use it as a LAN monitor by installing agents at two locations on the network. The exact configuration of the system is up to you. Obkio offers a 14-day free trial of its Premium plan.

Obkio Download 14-day FREE Trial

5. SolarWinds Pingdom

Pingdom is a Cloud-based system that monitors your website performance and your network performance from an external viewpoint, so you don’t have to install any software. The service is accessed through a Web browser, giving you a personalized dashboard, which you access with account credentials.

Key Features:

• Synthetic and Real-User Monitoring: Utilizes both synthetic and real-user monitoring to provide comprehensive insights into website performance and user experience.
• Global Uptime Monitoring: Monitors uptime from around the globe, ensuring website availability and performance are consistently maintained.
• Full-Stack Application Performance Monitoring: Provides full-stack monitoring, making it ideal for troubleshooting performance issues across various components of web applications.

Why do we recommend it?

SolarWinds Pingdom is designed to monitor the availability of Websites. The service includes both synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring tools to gather information on response times and possible errors on Web pages as well as uptime statistics.

As a cloud-based service, Pingdom is well-placed to examine the performance of your website’s internet connection and the delivery of web pages from your server. This is true even if you don’t have any onsite equipment and run your business entirely on Cloud-based services.

You can set up a dashboard view to watch stats from several sites all on the same page. This saves you from having to switch accounts in order to keep control of your multi-site business.

The service constantly tests your site’s availability from more than 100 locations around the world. Those uptime tests can be set to check on specific functions of your site, such as sign up or login procedures. That monitoring extends to tracking visitor journeys through your site. Those visitors can be selected at random, but you can also specify surfers to track if your site has frequent repeat visitors.

Problems get double-checked from another source to ensure that there is no false reporting. You get notified by an alert system when a confirmed site performance problem is detected. Those alerts can be channeled through to other apps that you use frequently in your system administration work. You can grade faults and also get them directed to different team members. You get the right to set up several different user accounts on the Cloud service to enable each team member to have a customized view of the dashboard with different levels of controls.

Who is it recommended for?

Any website owner would benefit from Pingdom, whether the site is hosted in-house or held on a hosting service, the ability to check whether the sited is accessible from different points on the globe is a great advantage, particularly for those that use content delivery networks.

Pricing is subscription-based with different service levels. You can get a 30-day free trial of the Pingdom system.

6. OutagesIO

OutagesIO offers two options: a hardware and a software solution to internet service monitoring. The hardware device is a box that attaches to your router and becomes part of your home or office network.

The firmware of the box is monitored by OutagesIO and gets updated automatically. The service is owned and run by Echo Networks and it is also marketed as Sane IP. A base edition of OutagesIO’s software version is available for free as a Community Edition.

Key Features:

• Hardware or Software Versions: Offers both hardware and software versions for monitoring internet connectivity and performance.
• Availability and Response Time Monitoring: Monitors the availability and response time of websites and network connections.
• Free Dynamic DNS (DDNS) Service: Provides a free DDNS service, enhancing flexibility in managing and accessing devices remotely.

Why do we recommend it?

OutagesIO is on-premises software that is available for all of the major operating systems. You can use this system for free by accessing the community edition. There is also a paid edition. This is a speed test and reliability check that is based on Ping.

The software version of the tool can be installed on Windows 7, 8, and 10, CentOS,  and Debian Linux, Raspberry Pi, and Tinker Board. The tool is able to monitor remote sites as well as the internet connection on your home site and you can also access a control panel in the Cloud.

The aim of this tool is to identify poor performance and outages on your internet connection. It is also able to tell if services on your web server are running slowly or have faults. The monitoring service extends to remote sites and Cloud services as well as onsite servers. The dashboard presents a bar graph of performance samples. Each sample can be queried for details by hovering the mouse pointer over it. The report identifies where the problem lies – local, internet service, or remote service. You can even see which hop on a connection is causing problems. You can set the dashboard to send you notifications by email when performance problems occur.

Who is it recommended for?

The OutagesIO is an easy-to-use system and its free version is good enough to keep continuous checks on the availability of a website or a remote location, such as another site. The free edition can be set to run periodically, which means you can leave it to trace outages for a Web server. This is a help if you have an uptime guarantee from your Web hosting services.

OutagesIO’s Community Edition is free forever and acts as a free trial for the paid editions of the software. This doesn’t give you any experience of the OutagesIO hardware solution and it doesn’t include all of the functions of the paid software options. Sign up for the Community Edition and, after trying that, you can decide whether to upgrade to the Extended plan. OutagesIO also offers a demo system at its website.

Added bonuses are a free DNS service and a security scan. The hardware option comes with a built-in DNS server and a webcam connection.

7. NodePing

NodePing is a subscription service that offers site availability checks at intervals of up to 15 seconds. The service can monitor up to 200 Web pages for each account.

Key Features:

• Uptime Monitoring: NodePing checks the availability of websites, servers, and services at frequent intervals, notifying users if there are any outages or performance issues.
• SSL Certificate Monitoring: Monitors the status and validity of SSL certificates, ensuring they are current and valid to avoid security warnings from browsers that could deter visitors.
• Protocol-Specific Checks: Supports a variety of protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, PING, SMTP, FTP, SSH, and more, enabling detailed checks based on the specific needs of different services.
• Service Problem Notifications: Sends notifications when service problems are detected to facilitate quick response and resolution

Why do we recommend it?

NodePing is another Ping-based internet testing system. This is a cloud-based service that issues Ping tests every minute on the base plan or every 15 seconds on higher plans. Those tests can be to a Web asset, such as a site, or they can travel over the internet, through your network to one of your own devices.

The service allows you unlimited user accounts so you don’t have to make all of your systems administration team log in with the same credentials. It is also possible to tailor each account’s dashboard so you can safely give junior members access without the risk of them getting powerful and potentially damaging control on the system.

It checks SSL connections to make sure that your HTTPS service is running correctly. As well as ensuring that the connection security is operating properly, NodePing will probe your web server and its services so it can give you precise reasons for poor performance once connection errors are detected. Tests extend to your email service and DNS system. You don’t have to install any software on your system in order to use the service because it is entirely cloud-based.

The NodePing program will notify you by email or SMS if problems are detected. International SMS messages are not charged for as an extra but are included in the subscription fee. The fee also includes access to diagnostic tools and there is a plan for web hosting companies that lets them provide access to NodePing utilities to their customers.

Who is it recommended for?

NodePing can monitor multiple sites and a subscribing business can set up an unlimited number of technician accounts on the system. Therefore, this service is very suitable for a business that runs multiple sites and has a team of technicians to look after them.

NodePing gives sellers a referral bounty and you can give the system a check by accessing a 15-day free trial.

8. Uptrends

The Uptrends service monitors a range of factors for websites, including internet service availability. The tool is a remote service, so you don’t need to install any software on your servers. The company offers packages of services that include Website and cloud resource monitoring. Tools in the bundle include real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring systems. As an external service, the availability and response time checks can be launched against any website, so you are not limited to checking you’re own sites, you can investigate those of your rivals as well.

Key Features:

• Website Uptime and Performance Monitoring: Uptrends monitors website uptime from several locations worldwide and checks the performance metrics to identify slowdowns or outages.
• Real User Monitoring (RUM): Captures and analyzes the interactions of actual users in real time, providing insights into user experience across different devices, browsers, and operating systems.
• API Monitoring: Allows users to monitor the functionality and responsiveness of APIs, ensuring that these critical components of web services perform as expected under various conditions.
• Multi-Browser Monitoring: Uses real browsers to simulate user interactions with websites to detect issues related to browser-specific rendering and functionality.

Why do we recommend it?

Uptrends is a website availability checker that is delivered from a cloud platform. You can choose from 230 test launch locations and it is also possible to set up your own private test locations. As well as availability tests, the Uptrends package includes real user monitoring, SSL certificate checks, and DNDS tests. It is possible to test the performance of file servers.

Apart from the subscription services, Uptime offers a basic Website availability monitoring service for free. You just enter a site URL and your email address into the monitoring system and it will perform availability and response time checks continuously. The service emails you regular performance reports and will also email you an alert if the site is unavailable. The free service can be run from several locations around the world and it double checks before sending you a notification that the site is down.

The service will check a range of factors on your site, including SSL certificates, DNS records, and FTP server performance. Performance samples are taken every minute and the graphs that represent this data can be exported to PDF or Excel format and you can also email reports out. The Uptrends service will store your historical data for analysis for two years.

The monitor has a customizable dashboard that includes lots of visualizations. You can add on user accounts for all of your team and tailor the dashboard for each, or for groups of users.

The service will send you alerts by email, SMS, or through some other communication app, such as Slack. You can access the dashboard from anywhere, including on mobile devices.

The system will track real user journeys through your site and record the load times for all pages visited. It will also assess the mobile-friendliness of your site.

Who is it recommended for?

Anyone running a website needs to make sure that it is available to visitors and checking from your own site isn’t good enough because outages can occur in some parts of the world while it is still available to you. A free version of the service offers a good way to get to know Uptrends.

We have been watching Uptrends for quite a while now and the service has considerably improved over the last year. The Free Website Monitoring service is a nice favor to small businesses that have budget issues, so that’s nice to see. Uptime offers a long list of other free tools as well. The paid plans have been improved as well, with a slimmer menu.

The paid services are packaged in three editions: Starter, Business, and Enterprise. All plans include availability and response times tests and also real user monitoring and cloud monitoring. The higher plans include browser-based tests, SLA monitoring, and more checkpoints. You can get a 30-day free trial of any plan.

9. Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers a full web application management service, which includes performance tracking. The system traces web page and service delivery times and compares every element involved in the page transfer to work out which creates poor performance. This monitor is particularly strong at scrutinizing the performance of JavaScript and it will highlight any program errors and run failures.

Key Features:

• Full-Stack Monitoring: Dynatrace provides end-to-end visibility across the entire application stack, from the front-end user interface through to the infrastructure layer, including servers, networks, and cloud environments.
• AI-Powered Analytics: Dynatrace’s AI engine, Davis, automatically analyzes data to detect anomalies, provides root cause analysis, and offers actionable insights, minimizing the need for manual intervention in problem resolution.
• Real User Monitoring (RUM): Tracks and analyzes the interactions of actual users in real-time, helping to identify issues with the user experience across various platforms and devices.
• Synthetic Monitoring: Uses simulated user actions to test the availability and performance of websites, APIs, and applications from various global locations around the clock.

Why do we recommend it?

Dynatrace is a different proposition from the Ping-based options on this list. It is a full application monitoring service with interesting features, such as application discovery and dependency mapping, distributed tracing, and AI-based performance alerts. Connection performance is part of the package.

As well as watching delivery times, Dynatrace shows a typical visitor journey through your site, so it is a handy source of marketing data as well as an operations performance monitoring tool.

This is a Cloud-based service, but you do need to install some software on your system. This is the OneAgent, which runs on Windows Server or Linux. It will give you stats on the performance of hosted sites as well as sites that you run from your own servers.

Who is it recommended for?

Dynatrace is a lot more than just a connection testing service. This is a full, automated application monitoring service that is able to monitor APIs and microservices as well as on-site services and Web applications. So, businesses with complex, Web-based systems would benefit from this package.

The service is charged on a subscription model and you can try it for free for 15 days.

10. Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot started out as a free internet monitoring service but now there is also a paid version available. The free version will check on the performance of your website every five minutes, while the paid version, called Pro, will check on your site’s delivery speed every minute.

Key Features:

• Uptime Monitoring: Uptime Robot checks websites, servers, and ports at frequent intervals (as often as every 5 minutes for free plans and every minute for paid plans) to ensure they are up and running.
• Alerting System: Offers a robust alerting mechanism that notifies users via email, SMS, webhooks, and third-party integrations (like Slack, Telegram, etc.) when their monitored services go down.
• SSL Monitoring: Monitors SSL certificates to ensure they are not only valid but also haven’t expired, helping to prevent security warnings that could deter site visitors.
• API Monitoring: Checks the availability and response time of APIs, ensuring that backend services function correctly and efficiently.

Why do we recommend it?

Uptime Robot is a cloud-based Ping system that makes periodic checks on website availability. The service will also keep track of SSL certificate expiry and perform port scanning to identify which services are running.

Another difference between the Free and Pro services is that the data retention period is three months with the Free service but two years with the Pro edition. There is also a top plan available, called Enterprise, which is a custom package.

Performance data can be set to trigger an alert when transfer time exceeds a set time. These alerts are delivered by SMS or voice call and they are not available in the Free service. A Pro account includes a credit of 20 notifications a month. If your Web assets experience a lot of problems and those notification credits run out, you can choose to top up with a payment for extra notification credits or just let notifications stop for the rest of the month.

You get 50 monitors with the free version. Pricing for the paid version depends on how many monitors you choose to deploy. These monitors are situated at different points of the globe. There are different monitor types in the package. These are HTTPS, HTTP, Ping, and Port monitors. You can also run a keyword check on your site to get a report on the presence of desired keywords in your content.

This is a great service that is easy to manage.

Who is it recommended for?

Uptime Robot is very suitable for small businesses that run websites. A free option that launches tests every five minutes is an attractive offer for the owners of one or two sites.

11. Uptime

Uptime is another Cloud-based web-checking service. This utility can monitor sites that are on-premises, on remote sites, or in the hands of an online hosting service. This tool will check on the site availability of your internet services, servers, and applications. It will check on page load speeds for your site and check on the general health of your web services including DNS records.

Key Features:

• Uptime and Downtime Monitoring: Uptime.com checks websites, servers, and APIs to monitor their availability and performance, offering notifications if any disruptions occur.
• Real User Monitoring (RUM): This feature provides insights into how real users interact with a website, tracking performance metrics across different devices and geographical locations.
• Transaction Monitoring: Uptime.com can simulate and monitor multi-step transactions (like logins, form submissions, and shopping cart processes), crucial for e-commerce and service-oriented sites.
• Page Speed Monitoring: Measures load times and performance of web pages to identify bottlenecks and improve user experience.

Why do we recommend it?

Uptime is a cloud-based service that offers a range of tests for websites. Checks include connection reliability, response times, page load times, SSL certificate validity checks, and DNS tests.

The Uptime monitoring package includes a status page service that will notify users gracefully of missing pages or incorrect addresses. The tool also gives you the ability to follow visitor journeys through your site with its real user monitoring.

The service is available on a subscription basis with four different service plans. Uptime has servers all over the world from which you can run your system checks. You get access to more geographical locations with the higher plans.

Who is it recommended for?

A website owner gets all of the services that support a website tested and that includes servers and applications. A website owner can leave this tool to monitor the performance of a website because Uptime generates attention-grabbing alerts if problems arise.

If you want to try out the service without risk, pick up the 21-day free trial.

12. Status Cake

StatusCake is another online service for monitoring internet service. This tool will check on the performance of a website and identify whether the problem is due to the internet service, a troubled hop on the route, the webserver, or services and applications that support the site.

Key Features:

• Uptime Monitoring: StatusCake performs checks at regular intervals from over 28 different countries around the world, ensuring that websites are accessible globally and notifying users if downtime is detected.
• Page Speed Monitoring: It tests how long web pages take to load from different locations worldwide, allowing users to identify potential performance issues that could affect user experience.
• Server Monitoring: Alongside website uptime and performance, StatusCake can monitor server health, ensuring that the backend infrastructure is functioning correctly.
• SSL Monitoring: Monitors SSL certificates to alert users before they expire, reducing the risk of website security warnings that can deter visitors and impact reputation.

Why do we recommend it?

Status Cake is very similar to Uptrends. This service checks on internet connections to a Web server, the server’s performance statistics, SSL certificate expiry, DNS availability, and protocol performance. The accumulation of test results makes it easy to spot the cause of performance issues on a website.

The service has servers that launch tests from 30 countries around the world and that lets you see the performance of your sites when accessed from faraway locations.

The server monitoring service is only available for Linux servers. The checks that the StatusCake service includes are Ping, HTTP, SSH, SMTP, and TCP. It will also monitor the DNS entries for your domain. You can see live feedback on site performance issues in the dashboard and you can also get reports run on schedule and emailed to you.

Who is it recommended for?

This is a nice, total package for a website owner. Tests occur every minute and if you are prepared to accept a power test cycle frequency of 15 minutes, you get the system for free.

There is a free version of this service, which performs tests every 15 minutes. The paid plans check every minute. You can get a 7-day free trial of both the Superior and Business plans.

Monitoring internet performance

You may have a great product and a fantastic website, but if it is slow to load, visitors will give up and look at the next site on the search engine results page. You can’t sit and test your own site yourself thoroughly. For one thing, you probably have better things to do than sit and constantly reload your site’s pages and for another, you will never be able to test its performance when accessed from the other side of the world without help.

Getting an internet monitor will save you a lot of time and help you spot web delivery problems as soon as they arise. Make the most of the free versions or free trials of the tools that are in this guide to try out several options without risking any money.

Do you use an internet monitoring solution? Have you tried any of the tools listed in this guide? Leave a message in the Comments section below and share your user experience with the community.

Internet Monitoring Software FAQs