A site is considered available when the web server is successfully serving an HTML file for the page in question, i.e. returning a "200 OK" response with a "text/html" body. - If the response is a redirect then the redirect will be followed and then the new URL checked instead.

Sitemorse monitoring regularly checks your page for changes. If a problem is detected an alert is sent out via email and/or SMS. Features include:

• Unlimited alert recipients
• Personal “thresholds” per recipient – ensure only the relevant people are informed

Sitemorse offers two different monitoring contracts:

Standard clients

• thresholds based on Sitemorse scores and total number of failures

Enterprise clients

• flexible alerting, down to individual tests
• Scaling alerts:
  • Alert different based on the severity of a particular type of problem (e.g. the number of missing links on a page. If one was missing you could alert person “A”. If 5 were missing you could alert person “A” and immediately escalate it to person “B” as well).
• Escalation
  • Definable “delay before alerting”
  • Establish a “chain” by adding a longer delay on additional recipients. If the problem is not resolved the person next up the chain is informed.
• Spell checker integration

The response time figure shows the time elapsed between Sitemorse's HTTP client starting the request for a particular URL, and when the web server starts responding with the content data (sometimes known as "time to first byte").

It is important to note, especially in larger reports, that the report shows the average response time across all requests made to your web server during that test.

Sitemorse sends messages via email and/or SMS.

More than checking if your site is up Sitemorse users set thresholds ensuring only alerts relevant to each individual are received, i.e. a drop in Performance triggers an SMS message to the network manager, whereas a detailed email message can be emailed to the web development team if an Accessibility error is detected.

Individual web pages can have their own monitors, and thresholds. These must however all output HTML.

If you wish to monitor a downloadable document, such as a PDF file, instead monitor an HTML document linking to the file. Then that link will be checked (along with all the other links in the page).

Although you cannot directly affect the reliability of sites outside your control, links from your site to third party sites are nevertheless regarded as being part of your site by site visitors.

If a user clicks on a link on your site, and the next thing they see is an error page, they will generally regard that as a failure of your site. Additionally, external link failures sometimes require you to do something about, for example, if the external site has moved or been re-arranged or de-commissioned.

If an external link is frequently down, you may wish to consider whether or not it is worth putting such an unreliable link on your site.

That it provides alerts for problems.

That it does not generate false alarms.

Occasionally, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that hosts a monitoring service may not be able to link to the ISP hosting the monitored website, creating the false impression that the monitored website is unavailable. In order to ensure that this does not happen, the monitoring service should be hosted by an ISP with the highest availability possible. Sitemorse is hosted by an ISP with a 100% availability record for over three years.

There are numerous reason to receive an error code 500: "The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request". If you cannot recreate the error yourself it can be difficult to fix.

The best place to start is by looking at your web server logs, search for the error code and see if there is any pattern. When under heavy load some servers return such an error when their execution has taken longer than expected.

Click “add a new alert recipient” on the Monitor page takes you to the page for defining who should be alerted and how.

When setting up an alert recipient you need to establish:

• A method of contact, either email or mobile number
• A name and description

And finally a set of thresholds, which when deviated from cause an alert to be sent

Setting Thresholds - Standard Version

The standard version limits the criteria you can specify. A single page split into the different sections of Function, Accessibility, Code Quality etc allows you to establish the various threshold levels.

If you do not wish to trigger an alert for any specific criteria, simply leave the box blank

Setting Thresholds - Enterprise Version

The Enterprise version breaks down the threshold options over several tabs:

• Summary
• Spelling
• Function
• Accessibility
• Code Quality
• Performance
• Metadata

Setting Thresholds - Summary Tab

The summary tab allows you to set the who, how and when.

Setting Thresholds - Function Tab

In addition to the standard function thresholds at the top, a new table mirroring the Sitemorse report is shown.

Three columns - Internal, External and Total - permit specific thresholds to be set for each test.

For example, to be alerted if four or more external broken links are found, enter 4 in the Ext column of “url/fetch/notfound”.

For the same error it may be more important to know if any internal broken links are found, therefore enter 1 in the Int column of “url/fetch/notfound”.

Similarly it may be desirable to know immediately if a bad URL path is detected, whether internal or external. In that case enter 1 in the Total column of “file/url/badpath”.

The other option tabs present very similar screens for you to define the thresholds.

To get more detail, visit the monitor page

The page draws the two line and two pie charts, scroll down to the bottom of this page and you will see the dates of the tests, click the date when the problem was reported, this will then list the individual tests – you will be able to see the one with the problem, click this and this will present all the data for that test including the detail of any problems.

Monitoring not only includes the HTML of the page itself, but also all images and other content used by the page, this includes checking all hyperlinks leading away from the monitored page.

If one of these resources is down, or responding very slowly then the monitored page itself is incomplete.

Sitemorse checks all the Mail Exchange servers for a domain when it verifies an email address. It goes through the SMTP protocol exchange as if a message was going to be sent to the recipient, stopping just short of the point at which an email would actually be generated.

Sitemorse correctly, by design, notifies you if any of the mail servers for your domain are not operating correctly. Faulty secondary mail servers can cause problems to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the nature of the fault, and in any case a server which regularly has problems will need either repair or removal from the list of mail exchangers.

Many domains are configured with a single primary mail server and one or more simple store-and-forward backup servers. If the primary is down mail should not bounce but will be delayed and delivery possibly interrupted until the server is back up again.

Monitor summary data is available to download as a CSV formatted file for offline analysis.

To download the data, start by navigating to the monitor page.

Next From the "Trend Analysis" links underneath the main graph select "This Month".

You can change the reporting period, interval and how the data is averaged on the right hand side.

When ready click, "Download CSV spreadsheet".