Plesk Official Podcast

The Importance of Site and Server Monitoring with Vincent Van Megen

Episode Summary

Imagine the following situation: As a website owner you are receiving a message from a visitor that your website is down. It gives a bad impression and costs you sales now and can diminish trust with consumers. In other words, when your site is unavailable or underperforming, you want to be the first one to know – you don’t want to hear it from a potential customer. In order for that to happen, you need monitoring. Luckily, Vincent Van Megen is here to tell us the most important facts about monitoring – what it is and how Plesk’s new offering, 360 Monitoring, can help.

Episode Notes

In this Episode: Mitigating quickly, Log and Blacklist monitoring

So much effort often goes into building a website or project, creating content, keeping the site secure, backing it up and all of the other tasks it takes to keep a site running smoothly. Thus we tend to overlook the best way to mitigate a site going down or slowing down: monitoring. 

Vincent Van Megen, Head of Monitoring for Webpros, is here to tell us what site and server monitoring are, why they are important, how they work and the best way to set up monitoring for your site. 

We also dig into 360 Monitoring, a new offering from Plesk/ Webpros that really lives up to its name. On top of site and server monitoring, it also offers log monitoring and blacklist monitoring. 

Plus: what you need to do when you get a dreaded downtime notification.

Key Takeaways

• You want to be aware at all times what’s going on. At the website level, there are so many things that can go wrong, from expired SSL certificates to an outage at Cloudflare.
• Downtime means additional expense. Some estimate that a website being down can cost a company $5,000/hr. 
• When it comes to server monitoring, you want to be sure your website is performing properly. Server monitoring will check things like memory, speed, MySQL queries and other metrics that could affect performance.
• So how does it work? The monitor sends a request to the site every few minutes. It gets the HTTP response and measures a whole bunch of metrics, like time to first bite, to make sure everything is loading properly and quickly. 
• You also want to check at locations around the world.
• If something is determined to be down, you will get a notification (email, Slack or even webhook) to let you know. Then you can mitigate from there.
• Mitigating quickly is super important for two reasons: 100% uptime is a myth, so you need to be ready. It’s also much easier to lose trust than to gain it again. So showing visitors you’re reliable will help gain and keep trust.
• 360 Monitoring by Plesk is designed to make monitoring as easy as possible for the user. It even includes log and blacklist monitoring. 
• Blacklist (email/ spam) monitoring is super important because it can be super hard to detect. People won’t necessarily know if they don’t get an email from you. 360 Monitoring keeps track of hundreds of MX blacklists.
• 360 Monitoring isn’t only for Plesk customers either. You can get 1 site monitored for free and you can install everything with a single installation command from your server.

The Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops Featuring

Joe Casabona

Joe is a college-accredited course developer and podcast coach. You can find him at Casabona.org.

Vincent Van Megen

Vincent is the Head of Monitoring at WebPros.