There’s plenty of free monitoring apps for your blog or small site that just ping and send emails. There are also cheap services (like Pingdom) that can check a page every 5 min, store response times, and alert you via SMS if it’s not accessible from some part of the world. If that’s all you need, that’s awesome. I have a high-traffic site and, for various reasons, the “ping” checks from those services are not always enough.

I started using Browsermob’s load testing suite first, which has helped me at least twice in tracking down significant bottlenecks under high load. This new monitoring system provides more customization and in-depth results than I can get from Pingdom alone.

Sometimes I need to make sure the right *content* is showing up (Apache might be responding, but what if there is a problem with the database), sometimes (when I know my site is going to be hammered) I want to check *every minute* to see that it’s up and how fast it’s responding. On one occasion I needed proof that a 3rd party tracking image was loading slowly and blocking the rest of the content… you can’t do that with the free services.

Hopefully you get the idea – You can get simple free monitoring, and you can get crazy complicated and expensive monitoring. Browsermob fills the gap by letting you take what you need when you need it.

There’s plenty of free monitoring apps for your blog or small site that just ping and send emails. There are also cheap services (like Pingdom) that can check a page every 5 min, store response times, and alert you via SMS if it’s not accessible from some part of the world. If that’s all you need, that’s awesome. I have a high-traffic site and, for various reasons, the “ping” checks from those services are not always enough.

I started using Browsermob’s load testing suite first, which has helped me at least twice in tracking down significant bottlenecks under high load. This new monitoring system provides more customization and in-depth results than I can get from Pingdom alone.

Sometimes I need to make sure the right *content* is showing up (Apache might be responding, but what if there is a problem with the database), sometimes (when I know my site is going to be hammered) I want to check *every minute* to see that it’s up and how fast it’s responding. On one occasion I needed proof that a 3rd party tracking image was loading slowly and blocking the rest of the content… you can’t do that with the free services.

Hopefully you get the idea – You can get simple free monitoring, and you can get crazy complicated and expensive monitoring. Browsermob fills the gap by letting you take what you need when you need it.

1) Although such services exist, they are usually quite complex and just include way too many features or the features are hard to use.

2) Such services are not cheap.

I think BrowserMob is playing in a niche market here. For the big companies, they may need the expensive services with complex features. But for smaller startups, there isn’t anything out there that is cheaper and provides a nice bundle of features to monitor the website health.

1) Although such services exist, they are usually quite complex and just include way too many features or the features are hard to use.

2) Such services are not cheap.

I think BrowserMob is playing in a niche market here. For the big companies, they may need the expensive services with complex features. But for smaller startups, there isn’t anything out there that is cheaper and provides a nice bundle of features to monitor the website health.