Now that Pingdom has permanently closed its doors to free users, many customers are searching for alternatives to stand in the gap for their web monitoring needs.
Web monitoring keeps you from losing potential business because of site or service downtime.
David Sanchez of Mammoth Web Solutions says: “You have to continuously monitor your domain, because every new integration can affect domain performance. We recommend testing site loading speed before and after every update and added integration.”
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While there are some basic criteria to consider for your web infrastructure monitoring needs, each company packages them differently. It can be very hard to tell if two software programs do exactly the same thing because features often have different names from platform to platform.
Page load time is one of the most critical aspects of web performance. If your site doesn’t load fast enough, website visitors will go elsewhere and you may be penalized by Google. Another important metric to measure is time to first byte.
Internal monitoring checks the availability of your web infrastructure from within your company network. External monitoring is crucial to judging the performance of your website from outside your network, where website visitors and customers access it.
Website visitors may have an entirely different view of your website, and a high TTFB may not be caught by relying solely on your internal network metrics. This is why many companies invest in both internal and external monitoring solutions to ensure network health for both your employees and clients.
According to Taz Lake of Brightmill, there are lots of things that can impact TTFB.
“Bad performance can be caused by many issues including out of date software and hardware, poor DNS services, as well as end-user device capability. Old PHP and out of date WordPress instances are par for the course. Also, complexity really clashes with performance, so removing unused technology components like old plugins can also help.”
Free speed tests are a great starting point, but continual monitoring is the gold standard for organizations that depend on the internet for revenue. Using a Ping/ICMP check like those provided by Uptime.com are a great way to keep an eye on this metric.
Continuously monitor website speed and receive alerts with an Uptime.com free trial, no credit card required.
If you type “Free Domain Health Check” into Google, there’s about 152 million results (at time of publishing this article).
Yes, there are plenty of free testing tools. But running a random, one-off domain health check isn’t going to ensure the health of your domain on a continual basis, even with regular testing.
Plus, the services these free tools provide are always limited in functionality. (We offer a free domain check as well, and it puts too much load on our servers to offer a fully-featured tool for free to everybody who wants it.)
In order to ensure your domain is healthy in the long-term, monitor one or more aspects of your web infrastructure including:
Security is always a concern, but SaaS tools that focus solely on web monitoring often realize that you will have your own staff and software to deal with keeping your domain locked up tight.
In order to help those of you who are trying to find a viable pingdom alternative, here are the tools we’ve found that may be useful for you. Keep in mind there are both free and paid versions of some tools, but the free versions are very limited.
Naturally, we believe Uptime.com is a viable alternative to those searching for a new web monitoring software to check HTTP/S errors and monitor your web infrastructure.
According to Mike Fleisher, Co-Founder of Starboard Suite, “The interface is clean and straightforward, the API makes it easy to add and remove checks programmatically and the pricing is competitive.”
Here’s the nitty gritty:
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 minute for most
Special Features: Maintenance Windows, Escalations, SSO, Audit Log, custom branded reports, status pages, unlimited tests on the checks you setup, Voice Call/SMS alerts
Multiple Users: Yes, with SSO configuration as well
Support: Email, chat, phone
Integrations:
Price: $15-229/month, 21-day full-featured free trial (no credit card required)
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 5 minutes (free version), 1 minute (Pro version) for most
Advanced features: ignore minor downtime with alerting every x minutes (Pro version), Maintenance windows (pro), status pages, SMS OR Voice calls (Pro version), 12 months of logs (Pro, 2 months of logs for Free)
Multiple Users: No
Support: Email, chat, phone
Integrations:
Price: Free to $649/month (annual pricing)
Notes: Unclear the amount of locations. Main page says 50, but IP list only includes about 25. It does state that remote nodes/servers have dynamic IP addresses which is why they are not listed on the locations page. The main servers that check for outages are all located in Dallas, TX USA; so downtime in other locations may go undetected since their locations page states they check for downtime at their main servers first (all located in Dallas, TX).
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 minute for most
Advanced features: Maintenance windows, on-call/off-duty schedules for contacts, status pages, SMS and/or Voice call alerts, Advanced plans let you select locations to monitor from
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: Email, phone and “Premium Support”
Other: Logs only saved for 90 days, some plans are as low as 14 days
Integrations:
Price: $14.59 to $204.21/mon for Basic, $34.94 to $63.21 for Advanced, Free 30-Day Trial no credit card required
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 minute for most
Advanced features: Maintenance windows, on-call/off-duty schedules for contacts, status pages, SMS and/or voice call alerts
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: Email, Forum, Chat & Phone
Notes: Logs based on file size (500MB) instead of number of days in history. Only monitors from 8 locations (from 90+ probe servers). Generous allowances for Real User Monitoring (from 100K/mo pageviews to 1M/month). Also does server, network, and application performance monitoring
Integrations:
Price: Free to $225+/mon for Website Monitoring (annual, other types of plans are available), Free 30-Day Trial no credit card required
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 minute for most
Advanced features: status pages, SMS alerts
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: Support page doesn’t list Freshping, no information available on support options on website
Other: Only checks from 10 locations, free plan doesn’t let you buy additional checks, cannot remove Freshping logo from Status pages, have to submit a support ticket in order to purchase a plan
Integrations:
Price: Free to $36/mo
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 minute for most
Advanced features: status pages, SMS/voice call/email alerts, maintenance windows, escalations, on-call setup for contacts
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: Email, live chat and phone
Other: Very expensive compared to other plans, no integrations listed on their website
Integrations: None mentioned, but does integrate with PagerDuty
Price: $89 to $249/mo
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 minute for most
Advanced features: SMS/email alerts, maintenance windows, escalations, on-call setup for contacts, custom notifications
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: Forums
Other:Open source software, will probably need to hire staff to build a solution, support not readily available, have to rely on IT team knowledge and forums for implementation.
Integrations: Custom
Price: Free
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 30 seconds to 5 minutes for most
Advanced features: SMS (paid plans only)/email alerts
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: email and chat (no other support options listed on website but may have phone support)
Other: virus scanning only supports a max of 10 URLs and 1000 files, no RUM or transaction checks
Integrations:
Price: Free to $79.99/mo 7-day trial no credit card required
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 minute for uptime monitors, 5 mins for all others
Advanced features: SMS and voice alerts, public status pages and widgets, escalations and maintenance windows
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: email and phone, support docs on website
Other: Pricing is very complicated, you have to build a plan (including check intervals) to see the price, also includes Windows and Linux network monitoring, web application monitoring.
Integrations:
Price: $9+mo, 15-day trial no credit card required
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 – 10 minutes for most
Advanced features: SMS/email alerts, maintenance windows, escalations, on-call setup for contacts, custom notifications
Multiple Users: Yes for additional fee
Support: Yes, but how is not listed
Other: Monitor from 50 probe servers but doesn’t state their location, basic plan only allows alerts to one person, basic plan only retains history for one month, provides data on load times and latency
Integrations: API (additional fee)
Price: $10-20/mo, free 14-day trial
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 30 seconds – 2 minutes for most
Advanced features: SMS/email alerts
Multiple Users: No
Support: Chat, email
Other: Monitoring is only from two locations (one in Ireland and one in Northern VA USA.) High probability of false positives
Integrations:
Price: Free to $20/mo
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 minute for most
Advanced features: SMS/email/voice call/Slack alerts, public status pages, maintenance windows, select locations
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: chat, email, phone, dedicated account manager
Other: It’s unclear how many locations RapidSpike monitors from. Software also does SEO monitoring for Alexa ranking, Google Analytics, and SEO stats (Domain Authority, Page Authority, Backlink profiles)
Integrations: Google Authentication, Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft teams/Office 365,
Webhooks, Pushover
Price: $8.25-325/mo, free 14-day trial
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 1 minute for most
Advanced features: SMS/email/voice call, public status pages, maintenance windows, select locations, on-call/contact scheduling
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: chat, email, phone, dedicated account manager
Other: It’s unclear how many locations they monitor from, which can create false positives.
Integrations:
Price: $8-50/mo, free 15-day trial
Checks Available:
Check Intervals: 30 secs to 2 minutes for most
Advanced features: SMS/email/voice call, public status pages, maintenance windows, select locations, on-call/contact scheduling
Multiple Users: Yes
Support: email
Other: Very low history max retention time is 30 days, only 2 check locations (Europe and US) makes it impossible to detect regional downtime.
Integrations:
Price: $12-24/mo, free 7-day trial
If you’re still searching for a Pingdom alternative to their free plan, maybe it’s time to give a paid plan a try. We truly believe that accurate web monitoring is the most important business objective when it comes to web infrastructure.
Minute-by-minute Uptime checks.
Start your 21-day free trial with no credit card required at Uptime.com.