Investigating issues before your customers are impacted

When running council and public sector websites, it is important to ensure all your services are running reliably.

RapidSpike offers a suite of monitoring tools focused on reliability to help you detect and resolve issues before they impact your users.

Uptime Monitors

RapidSpike provides the capability to add Uptime Monitors for both webpages and servers, ensuring comprehensive monitoring of your online presence. An uptime monitor is a simple check to see if your website is ‘online’. Most commonly, an uptime check looks out for a 200 or 3XX status code (that tells us that the website is online and reachable). Otherwise, we want to ensure there are no unexpected statuses like 404 codes (that tells us the page cannot be found).

Let’s explore how you can utilize RapidSpike’s Uptime Monitors effectively.

Add a Page:
- Navigate to RapidSpike and select the option to add a new page.
- Alternatively, you can create a new uptime monitor directly from the homepage.
Create Uptime Monitor:
- Upon creating a new page, you’ll encounter the option to add an Uptime Monitor.
- Select “Page Uptime” and proceed to configure the monitor settings.
Configuration and Creation:
- Configure the monitor settings according to your preferences.
- Click on “Create Monitor” to initiate the monitoring process.

Now, RapidSpike will continuously monitor your webpage’s uptime status and promptly notify you in case of any disruptions.

Page Load Monitors

A Page Load Monitor goes a step further and loads your page in the browser. This is better for allowing you to check beyond the status of the page and see more detailed information. Your page may be ‘up’, but is it loading correctly?

Explore detailed metrics such as DOM, Render, and Total Load time in the Results tab.
Use the Failure Analysis section to delve into Page Load Failures and compare test results.
Utilize the Waterfall chart to visualize resource loading and identify performance bottlenecks.
Analyze individual elements on the page, including Request and Response Headers, in the Tracked Elements tab.
Review third-party loading details to understand their impact on page performance.

Much like you would set up an uptime monitor, you can add a Page and create a new ‘Page Load’ monitor.

Page Load Monitors are particularly useful as they allow you to check on any third parties you are using on your website.