How your website performs for your users is crucial to its success. As a WordPress user, being aware of your site’s uptime and key performance metrics (e.g., CPU usage, disk processes, memory, network performance) can make or break your business or blog.
Thankfully, WordPress users have a number of options to help them stay on top of their site’s uptime and performance. One such choice is Site24x7, from Zoho Corp.
Site24x7 is a powerful and scalable cloud-based monitoring service. It lets individuals and teams monitor a variety of performance data and metrics around websites, servers, networks, applications, and real user experience.
It’s a flexible SaaS that works on both desktop and mobile devices. And it can be easily set up within minutes.
Site24x7 offers both free and paid options, and can scale to the needs of all sizes of IT and DevOps teams, from solopreneurs to larger businesses and agencies.
Although it initially began as just a website monitor, Site24x7 has grown to a global monitoring network across six continents and 30 countries. It currently has over 10,000 customers, including NASA, Honda, Cisco, Xerox, Harley-Davidson, GoDaddy, Groupon, and more.
Beyond its many tools and capabilities, Site24x7 also offers two plugins that are specific to WordPress users:
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
WordPress Server Monitoring
Site24x7 is a very deep and powerful program. In this review, we’ll take a brief look at its top features, how you can use it with WordPress, its different plans, and our recommendations.
Main Features of Site24x7
Site24x7 is a powerful monitoring service that helps you keep an eye on websites, servers, networks, applications, and users—all from a single console. Here’s a look at its main features:
Website Monitoring
From over 50 global locations, Site24x7 monitors different Internet services and key performance metrics, including the uptime of your site.
The service promises its users zero false alerts and provides reports that help pinpoint problem areas.
Site24x7 also monitors mobile websites and other services through wireless carriers and enterprise-level WiFi networks. And with iOS and Android apps, Site24x7 users can track their websites on the go.
Server Monitoring
Site24x7 monitors outages and performance issues for Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, VMware, AWS, Docker, Azure, and other cloud hosted applications and servers.
With the program’s Root Cause Analysis (RCA) capability, users can quickly find the reason behind any downtime .
You can also monitor resources on the server and get instant notifications for any resource violations.
Synthetic Transaction Monitoring
With Synthetic Transaction Monitoring, Site24x7 users can simulate and record advanced user interactions in browsers.
This feature allows you to create custom workflows that recreate the steps of your visitors, and receive alerts when performance issues arise. The collected data can help improve the usability of many applications (e.g., contact forms, ecommerce shopping carts, and more).
In order to identify problems based on geography and ISPs, simulations are monitored across six continents and 30 countries.
And Web applications can be monitored over public or private networks, as well as mobile devices. Site24x7 also gives its users global industry averages so they can compare their performance data against a broad measuring stick.
Network Monitoring
With network monitoring from the cloud, users can analyze performance and uptime of network devices like firewalls, routers, switches, load balancers, and WAN accelerators.
Site24x7 monitors network performance metrics like CPU, traffic, wireless signal strength, receive/transmit data rates, UPS battery stats, memory utilization, buffer hit stats, and more.
And automatic network discovery allows Site24x7 to quickly provide users with network device configuration details and performance metrics. Currently, Site24x7 supports over 1000 network device types and more than 100 vendors.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Application Performance Monitoring helps users monitor errors and performance data for application servers and components.
It includes monitoring for applications built in Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, AWS, cloud-based platforms, and more.
With APM, Site24x7 provides users with information like application response time, application throughput, background transactions, and database metrics. It also allows users to view metrics for mobile app performance on iOS and Android devices.
With the Application Performance Index (Apdex), Site24x7 can measure user satisfaction for a web application.
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
With Site24x7’s Real User Monitoring, you can analyze real-time application experience of website users, whether the webapp is accessed from a desktop or mobile device.
Site24x7 can monitor application response times based on platform, geography, ISP, browser, and more. This includes backend and frontend response times (e.g., page rendering, document downloads, document processing), JavaScript code errors, browser-based metrics, single page applications, AJAX requests, and more.
Cloud Monitoring
Site24x7 lets users monitor important applications hosted on the cloud for performance and health.
This includes applications using Amazon Web Services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3.
For instance, you can see the amount of resources being used in your cloud infrastructure, and fix issues before your end users are affected.
Site24x7 includes reporting, visuals, and smart alert mechanisms.
Dedicated API
With their Application Programming Interface, Site24x7 data can be used in a number of different ways. For instance, it be used to add and modify monitors, develop new apps, integrate with different platforms, create performance reports, and more.
Public Status Pages
Site24x7 provides customizable public server status dashboards to keep visitors informed about downtime and other service status messages, (such as scheduled service interruptions).
The server status dashboards also allow public posting of updates and comments about service issues.
To make sure that status pages are always available, Site24x7 hosts them on separate servers.
Alert Notifications and Reporting
When performance issues arise, Site24x7 provides fast notifications through email, text, voice calls, RSS, Twitter, and more. Additionally, reports provide performance summaries for response time, down time, and other performance metrics.
Third-Party and Custom Plugins
With Site24x7’s open ecosystem for plugins, users can use or create plugins that monitor the metrics that matter most to them.
Site24x7 includes support for thousands of prebuilt plugins for Linux and Windows, including plugins for WordPress, Apache, MySQL, Nagios, Redis, MongoDB, Zookeeper, NGINX, and more.
And if you need specific monitoring data not available in existing solutions, you can create your own Linux or Windows based plugins with custom scripting. By creating threshold values for your own custom set of attributes, you can be alerted when the values exceed the set limit.
WordPress Plugins
Beyond all of the features and tools that Site24x7 offers its customers, it also provides two free plugins that are specific to WordPress users:
Real User Monitoring (RUM) WordPress Plugin
This plugin will help you get a better look into visitor user experience on your WordPress site. It provides valuable information and analysis for such things as user interaction patterns, page rendering time, document processing time, document downloading time, browser performance, response time by geography, application performance (desktop and mobile), and more.
WordPress Server Monitoring Plugin
With this plugin, you’ll have a better understanding of the different performance metrics of your WordPress server.
Setting Up & Using Site24x7
While Site24x7 offers many features and options for monitoring, as WordPress users, let’s take a look at installing and using the Real User Monitoring plugin, available from the WordPress.org plugin repository.
Real User Monitoring
The Real User Monitoring plugin is free to use, although it does require an account with Site24x7.
When signing up, you get a 30 day trial period of their Business plan (no credit card required), that automatically gets downgraded to their Free plan after the 30 days. The Free plan allows basic monitoring of up to five websites.
The plugin provides information on end-user response times (worldwide), Apdex scores, response times by device, web transactions, summary reports, and more.
When you install the plugin, it will automatically add the RUM code snippet from Site24x7 to the footer tag of your WordPress site.
After adding the code snippet, Site24x7 starts collecting and providing data about your site’s performance based on real user activity.
It monitors and provides performance data for:
• CPU usage, memory, and disk processes
• Web applications with browsers
• Load times based on geographic region and devices
• Resources behind firewalls
• Internet services
• And much more
This information is provided through Site24x7’s control panel, email, and downloadable reports. It will help you solve performance problems and create better user experiences for your visitors. It can also be shared with your service provider.
Sign Up for a Free Site24x7 Account
To use this plugin, you first need to create a free Site24x7 account, which you can do here.
1. Enter your email, a password, and company name. Then click Sign up.
2. Sign into Zoho (Zoho is the creator of Site24x7).
3. Choose one of the two options they provide to activate your account.
If your account is new, choose option one and click Create New Account.
4. Enter the required information to set up your account.
5. Select what you would like to monitor.
Because we’re dealing with your WordPress site, you might choose Website and Internet Services.
You can also choose to monitor:
Servers
Synthetic Transactions
APM
6. Enter the domain/website URL of your WordPress site to let Site24x7 discover it and set up related services.
7. Click the Monitor Selected Resources button below the list of website resources that Site24x7 will monitor.
Install the Real User Monitoring Plugin
Now that you’ve created a free account with Site24x7, it’s time to download and install the Real User Monitoring plugin for WordPress.
1. In WordPress, go to Plugins… Add New.
2. Search for Real User Monitoring and click Install Now on the first result.
3. After installation, Activate the plugin.
Getting the Rum Key
After creating a free account at Site24x7, and installing and activating the Real User Monitoring plugin, let’s go back to Site24x7 and get the RUM key that connects the WordPress plugin to Site24x7’s monitoring service.
1. If needed, login to your Site24x7 account.
2. Go to the APM tab (in the left column), and then to Web RUM.
You should see an application listing that was created for your website. This application was created when you entered your site’s URL above.
3. At the far right side of the application listing, click the small menu icon and select Copy Web Script.
4. In the next window, copy the RUM key for WordPress.
5. Now, go back to your WordPress admin, go to the configuration page for Site24x7, and paste in the RUM key.
Viewing Your Site Data
After it gathers data about your site, you’ll be able to view the information at your Site24x7 console.
WordPress Server Monitoring Plugin
The other plugin that’s specific to WordPress users is the WordPress Server Monitoring plugin. Although free, this plugin is not available from the WordPress repository, but instead can be found at Site24x7 here.
The WordPress Server Monitoring plugin helps WordPress users monitor different performance metrics for WordPress servers.
It monitors various attributes of Apache, such as:
• Apache version
• PHP version and MySQL version
• Percentage of CPU and memory occupied by PHP processes
• Status of Apache server, PHP process, and MySQL server
• Total number of accesses of Apache server
• Total number of bytes served by Apache server
• Apache CPU load
• Apache uptime
• Average number of requests per second
• Average number of bytes served per second
• Average number of bytes per request
• Number of workers serving requests
• Number of idle workers
If you’re interested in monitoring the Apache servers that control your WordPress performance, you can go here for instructions on how to install and configure the plugin.
Site24x7 Support & Documentation
The Site24x7 monitoring service supports many operating systems and devices, including Linux, Windows, Macintosh, iPhone, Android, iPad, and more.
Currently, it’s available in English, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, Dutch, Finnish, and Chinese (Simplified) languages.
Site24x7 includes a variety of support and documentation options:
Email/contact form support
Customer portal/knowledge base
User guide
FAQs
Phone support
Video tutorials
Site24x7 Pricing
The cost for Site24x7 depends on which services you choose.
Currently, they offer the following service options:
Website Monitoring
Server Monitoring
APM
All-In-One Plan
Then, after selecting from the above services, you choose a plan within that service. You can see more details about each plan’s features and offerings here.
Note: Costs listed below are for plans purchased annually, (monthly plans are slightly more expensive). Also, Site24x7 offers “Add-Ons” that let you add certain features that aren’t normally included with a plan.
Website Monitoring:
Standard ($9/month)
10 total monitors
Business ($35/month)
40 total monitors
Premier ($449/month)
300 total monitors
Server Monitoring:
Standard ($9/month)
10 total monitors
APM (Application Performance Monitoring):
Business ($35/month)
40 total monitors
Monitor 3 applications
All-In-One Plan:
Business ($35/month)
40 total monitors
Premier ($449/month)
300 total monitors
Site24x7 Conclusions & Recommendations
Monitoring the uptime of your WordPress website, and the many technical components that make it run smoothly and efficiently, is potentially a full-time job unto itself.
However, with the help of services such as Site24x7, staying on top of the availability and performance of your site is done automatically for you.
The performance of your website is critical for many reasons. A good monitoring solution makes sure your website stays available so you can meet the needs of your customers and grow your business. It can also increase trust and reliability with the people who visit your site, keep you in good graces with search engines, and pinpoint problem areas so they can be attended to as quickly as possible.
If you’re looking for a scalable monitoring service that you can grow with—one that has the ability to monitor your entire application stack from a single console—Site24x7 deserves strong consideration. It’s an all-in-one service that monitors the uptime and performance of websites, servers, networks, and online applications. It’s a flexible SaaS solution that can be easily set up within minutes.
Site24x7 provides the tools and services to meet the needs of individual WordPress users or larger IT and DevOps teams. And with their free 30 day trial, you can check out their offerings without any cost or credit card information. If you’d like to find out more, you can do so here.
This is an analysis that was written to provide a valuable outside perspective to the creators of this product. They paid for a 100% honest, no-holds-barred break-down of all they are doing, both good and bad, because they want their product to be as good possible. In the interests of sharing that knowledge with the larger WordPress community, we also give them the option of publishing it here on WPMayor.com … but with the vital condition that the content cannot be altered or spun in any way: our readers expect and deserve the same 100% honesty.
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