Best practices for website monitoring

Parallel polling for shopping/booking websites
Avoid parallel polling for websites like ekart, booking sites because parallel polling leads to discomfort to the transaction.

Incognito mode recording
Please make sure to record the transaction in Incognito mode to avoid autofill and any cache-related issues.

Disable captcha in websites
To have a successful transaction monitoring experience, please make sure to disable or make an exception for Site24x7 for any type of captcha authentication.

Block domains
Please use block domains to avoid unnecessary page loading.

• Content Checks > Should contain
  Add crucial content (or) footer text in the Should contain string(s) field to ensure that the server is sending proper responses.
• Content Checks > XPath/JSONPATH Expressions
  For Rest API, the response would be in JSON or XML formats. It is ideal to configure JSONPATH/XPATH expression to ensure that the response is valid.

It is best to configure alerts based on expiry date and certificate thumbprint using Threshold Profile. Do not ignore certificate errors such as certificate chain errors or certificate revoked errors.

Configure the WHOIS server, if present, to query domain data. This can help to avoid querying from a default server. We suggest adding crucial content in the Should contain string(s) field to ensure that the returned WHOIS data contains expected data.

• Be aware of Record Changes
  Changes in the DNS records without your knowledge might result in service outages. To keep track of this, you can use any of the two options mentioned below:
  • Configure the Answer Validation option to compare the configured record values with the records from the Answer section.
  • Enable the Notify when the records are modified (Threshold Profile > Threshold Configuration) option to track the records using checksum.
• DNSSEC Extension
  Enable DNSSEC option from the Add/Edit form so that we can perform DNSSEC verification from our end to ensure that the chain of trust remains intact.

Configure the Allow Domains field to avoid unwanted defacement identification. Add pages manually when auto-discovery fails. Configure username and password for the sites that require basic authentication

Monitor the latest IP addresses from the domain. This can be done by setting the Resolve Hostname(s) on every poll field to Yes.

Enable this option to ensure that your certificate is valid and trusted.

• Threshold profile > Notify when the website content is modified:
  For static webpages, the content of the website would remain the same for long time periods.
  Enable Notify when the website content is modified so when the server returns partial content or when someone tampers with your website without your knowledge, you can get notified immediately.
• Threshold Profile > Notify when website content changes by percentage:
  For dynamically changing websites, the content of the website will change frequently. However, these changes will be in a similar pattern. For example, the website will always change by some percentage. So, enable Notify when website content changes by percentage to get notified if the content is modified.
• Threshold Profile > Response time threshold for primary and secondary locations:
  In peak hours, the rate of requests might increase and can affect the performance of the servers. So, configure the Response time threshold for primary and secondary locations to identify performance latency or network delays.

Manually add pages when the required pages are missing from the auto-discovery result.

Command and Content Checks
Configure Command and Content Checks to ensure that your application is functioning as expected.

Latency, Hop Count, Jitter
Configure thresholds for Latency, Hop Count, and Jitter to stay updated on the key performance metrics and ensure better performance.