SolarWinds® Pingdom® provides a range of services from user experience insights to proactive transaction monitoring.
For those evaluating TeamViewer Web Monitoring (Monitis), Pingdom is a trusted alternative in the same space.
This post examines the core features of both Monitis and Pingdom from a balanced standpoint, and we’ll cover the additional functionality Pingdom provides.
Let’s jump straight into why you need a web performance monitoring tool.
How Monitis and SolarWinds Pingdom Work
Owning a website doesn’t guarantee business success. In fact, a bad website can spell doom for your otherwise excellent concept. Besides a higher chance of being slow or down, a bad website won’t help visitors achieve what they came for, which is a frustrating user experience.
This is where Pingdom and Monitis come into play—albeit with different degrees of effectiveness. When either are monitoring your website, you get insight into how it’s performing. Coming from different vendors, the two services approach and present this differently.
We’ve outlined the features you’ll get from signing up for either option below.
Website Monitoring
At the most basic level, expect to get website performance metrics as soon as you configure Monitis or Pingdom. These include the following:
- Page speed (how fast your website’s pages load when accessed from various devices)
- Website uptime details (useful when calculating how often your website crashes)
- Transaction monitoring (automated tests designed to ensure both simple and complex, multi-step user interactions are performing as expected)
Continuous website monitoring is essential to resolving downtime as quickly as possible when they take place. However, as you’ll come to discover later in the post, Pingdom and Monitis don’t go about this in identical ways. It’s important to select the one that will give your team the best coverage of your web applications.
Network Monitoring
With each website hosted on a network and running worldwide, it’s important to monitor the pipeline, or network, through which users gain access to it. Now, it’s important to mention network monitoring is different from Montis to Pingdom.
Monitis approaches network monitoring from a peripheral standpoint. This means when you have an active TeamViewer Web Monitoring account, it keeps an eye on the printers, routers, and other computers within your immediate network.
More pressing to the typical need for a web monitoring tool, Pingdom tracks metrics around the network infrastructure specific to a web application.
Web Server Monitoring
The Monitis approach to web server monitoring provides the basics, including metrics on the server’s CPU and storage capacity. Pingdom, with its sister tools in a singular integrated experience, go deeper to provide details that enable a DevOps role to monitor and troubleshoot web applications and the servers supporting them. With this level of insight, Pingdom users don’t have to repeatedly log in to AWS (or any other cloud services provider) to gain visibility into the granular system components’ health. Instead, a singular, integrated set of functionalities provides this.
Features Pingdom Offers
Besides the features we’ve explored above, Pingdom provides additional monitoring features for complete digital experience monitoring. Given the competitive nature of most markets in which a website is critical to the success of a business, not having these features could mean missing out on important insights for optimization.
Real User Monitoring
Knowing how users interact with your website is a crucial part of improving their experiences. After all, a bad website fails at promoting visitors through their desired outcome.
Even without a custom user experience journey, real user monitoring (RUM) from Pingdom tracks user interactions based on browser, device, and geographic location. This allows you to deduce how your website performs across multiple demographics to make sure you’re hitting your KPIs and SLAs.
Pingdom Mobile App
Because developers often work on the go, Pingdom has a mobile app for real-time access to web application insights on Android and iOS devices.
Filmstrip and Timeline Metrics
Quick disclaimer: While Monitis lists page performance monitoring as part of its features, Pingdom gives simple and powerful performance insights through visualizations like the filmstrip. The filmstrip feature on Pingdom takes actual recordings of the browser as end users interact with your website. This adds to your overall control of the website’s performance beyond how the code runs to how it sells or achieves its intended purpose.
Synthetic User Monitoring (Simulations)
When you’re experiencing growth, or about to hit a peak season in your industry, it makes sense to test your website before it gets flooded by new traffic. Scaling without synthetic user simulations can cause unexpected crashing when resources are requested from all directions.
Pingdom synthetic user monitoring helps you identify patterns of performance issues. You can even simulate the end-user experience and set automatic notifications for your team to react in real time if the issue returns.
The Value of Your End-User Monitoring Tool
When it comes to getting ROI out of your web application monitoring tool, I think Pingdom is an excellent investment. Pingdom provides similar features to the core functionality of Monitis and offers additional features for IT/Web Ops, web developers and team managers, marketing/digital experience managers, and e-commerce business owners at a low monthly price.
Let’s compare what you get after paying for either product to demonstrate the value difference.
Pingdom vs. Monitis: Pricing
Most developers try out different tools before committing. That’s why most vendors lead with a trial period to help evaluation, which is true for both Monitis and Pingdom.
The difference? You get twice as long a trial period with the full-feature Pingdom (30 days) compared to the 15-day window Monitis provides.
While pricing is not identical, we can compare the cost of comparable features from both Pingdom and Monitis. Comparing both tools, I found you’d spend more money with Monitis than with Pingdom. At US$240/year, the lowest tier of Pingdom offers the valuable tools we’ve detailed above. You’d need to craft a custom invoice from the Monitis sales team to match this level of performance. Even before that, the least you can expect would be more than the readily available Pingdom price.
In the end, how much you pay for these tools depends on your unique set of requirements. Our exploration should direct you toward which option is right for your team and why. As a top alternative to Monitis, Pingdom brings many modern features to the table.
For Pingdom, true value emerges from not having to look across multiple tools for features competitors do not have. The fewer tools you have to maintain for visibility into the performance of your web application, the more value you’re getting.
This post was written by Taurai Mutimutema. Taurai is a systems analyst with a knack for writing, which was probably sparked by the need to document technical processes during code and implementation sessions. He enjoys learning new technology and talks about tech even more than he writes.
As of April 2021