Ecommerce

Network Monitoring for Serious eCommerce
By David Leonhardt

In the real world, businesses come in every size, from
self-employed entrepreneurs like me to mega malls like Wal-Mart.

On the Internet, companies come in every size, too, from a
stand-alone ebook sales page with webmaster and owner all in
one, to 300 pound gorilla like Amazon, with over a million
pages, who requires the entire population of a small country to
serve as webmaster.

If your site is a single page, it is its own network. But if
your site is any bigger, and you have plans to grow, it is a
network or is fast becoming one. You need network monitoring.

Most ecommerce webmasters are at least somewhat familiar with
website monitoring. Many use a website monitoring service or
software to keep track of "uptime" and "downtime".

At your local shopping mall, serious business requires more
than just knowing when the front doors are open and when they
are closed. Serious ecommerce needs to know more than just when
the site is accessible. That is what network monitoring is all
about.

What Network Monitoring Monitors

Chances are, your e-business owns one of the following, or uses
one of the following remotely:

DNS servers: These are used to translate your site name, like
www.mycompany.com, to the numbers called "IP addresses" that
computers understand. If DNS servers are not working properly,
end-users will not be able to find your site and will get an
error. Usually only an external or remote monitoring service
will detect such a problem.

An FTP server: File Transfer Protocol servers are used to help
you
exchange files with remote users. If you use FTP, a monitoring
service can make sure it is always up and running.

POP3 and SMTP servers: These are used for exchanging emails.
If you are using email, chances are you are using SMTP and POP3.
If your SMTP server is down, everyone who sends you email will
receive an error, stating that your mail server is down and
cannot accept incoming email. To say that the impression this
leaves your customers is bad would be an understatement. If your
POP3 server is down, you will be unable to retrieve email from
your mailbox. Once again, only external monitoring will prevent
such a problem.

Firewalls: Many businesses use firewalls to protect their
internal network from un-authorized traffic, such as spyware,
viruses and sabotage by competitors. Furthermore, a firewall is
your first line of defense. If your firewall goes down, your
whole network may actually become inaccessible from outside. In
other words, if you host your own web site and mail servers,
those will become
inaccessible to the outside world if your firewall goes down.
Once again, remote network monitoring is required to detect that
a problem exists and quickly get it repaired.

Internet connections: Users come to your network from multiple
backbones, depending on the company they use to connect to the
Internet and their location. It is important to insure that your
connection performs well for each user. A remote monitoring
service can ping your networks from multiple locations around
the world, thus testing most major routes to your web server or
network. Before hiring a network monitoring service, check to
see that they have both your customer geography and the Internet
backbone layout covered.

Very few websites of any size and functionality are anything
less than a complete network, and many networks rely on servers
in different parts of the world.

A good network monitoring service can ensure, as a base, that
all servers are properly functioning, that data can be sent to
and received from each server, and that each function sharing
the server responds as required. An advanced network monitoring
service can even remotely monitor the temperature of your
servers.

What you need to monitor depends on how extensive your network
is. A network monitoring expert can help you determine what
needs monitoring. If you own the servers, or are remotely
hosted on dedicated servers, you most likely need everything
monitored. If your site is hosted on shared servers, you might
need fewer functions monitored.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Leonhardt is a website marketing consultant and freelance
writer . He wrote this article for Dotcom-Monitor Website and
Network Monitoring. Read more on network perormance monitoring
or on external website monitoring.

Source: http://www.isnare.com