An illustration of IIS Server Monitoring featuring a laptop, servers, and a cube with a monitoring icon.

What is IIS Monitoring?

Internet Information Services (IIS) is a powerful web server software developed by Microsoft for hosting websites, applications, and services on Windows servers. It provides a robust platform for delivering web content, supporting various programming languages such as ASP.NET, PHP, and others.

IIS offers a range of features including support for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, and NNTP protocols, making it versatile for a wide range of web hosting needs. It also includes security features such as request filtering, SSL/TLS support, and authentication mechanisms to ensure the safety and integrity of hosted content.

With its modular architecture, IIS allows for easy extensibility through add-on modules and components, enabling users to customize and enhance the server’s functionality according to their specific requirements. Additionally, IIS Manager provides a user-friendly interface for managing server configurations, sites, applications, and other resources, making it accessible even to users with limited technical expertise.

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May 10, 2024 Educational No comments yet

What is Varnish Cache Monitoring?

Varnish Cache is an open-source, high-performance HTTP accelerator designed for dynamic and content-heavy websites. It works as a reverse proxy server, sitting in front of your web server(s), and caches content to serve it quickly to users, reducing the load on your web server and improving overall website performance.

How Varnish Cache Works

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May 10, 2024 Educational No comments yet

Xitoring Integration with Zapier

What is Zapier?

Zapier is a web-based automation tool that connects different apps and services together, allowing them to communicate and automate tasks without requiring any coding skills. It works on the principle of “Zaps,” which are automated workflows that link one app to another. These workflows consist of a trigger and one or more actions.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Trigger: A specific event occurs in one app. For example, a new incident detected by Xitoring on your servers, or a packet loss was detected on your website.
  2. Action: Once the trigger event happens, Zapier automatically performs a predefined action in another app. For instance, it could create a task in Trello, add a contact to Mailchimp, or notify you on selected notification channels.

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April 3, 2024 Blog No comments yet
A vibrant digital illustration featuring Docker Container Monitoring with a futuristic background.

What is Docker Container Monitoring?

Docker is a platform that makes it simpler to build, deploy, and execute programs utilizing containers. Containers enable a developer to bundle a program with all of its required components, including as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all as a single package. This ensures that the program will operate on any other system, independent of any specific settings that may differ from the one used to write and test the code.

In a way, Docker is a bit like a virtual machine. However, unlike a virtual machine, rather than creating a whole virtual operating system, Docker allows applications to use the same Linux kernel as the system that they’re running on and only requires applications be shipped with things not already running on the host computer. This gives a significant performance boost and reduces the size of the application. (more…)

March 26, 2024 Educational No comments yet

What is HAProxy Monitoring?

Do you struggle with website downtime and load management?
Ensuring that your online applications are highly accessible, secure, and performant is not a choice; it is a need. Many people wonder how they may do this without breaking the bank or overburdening their IT personnel. The solution is to use HAProxy to its full potential and develop appropriate monitoring methods.

Your Gateway to High-Performance Load Balancing

HAProxy, or High Availability Proxy, is an open-source load balancer and proxy server for TCP and HTTP applications. It is commonly used to split network or application traffic among multiple servers, which improves the dependability, efficiency, and availability of a service or application. HAProxy is well-known for its excellent performance, reliability, and extensive feature set, which includes SSL/TLS termination, HTTP/2 compatibility, WebSocket, and an advanced configuration syntax. (more…)

March 20, 2024 Educational No comments yet
A futuristic digital design with a dark background, blue circular wireframe elements, and the text "MySQL Monitoring" in white and blue.

What is MySQL Monitoring?

MySQL is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS). It is based on a client-server architecture and is one of the most popular SQL (Structured Query Language) database management systems available today. MySQL is used to manage and organize data in tables, and it supports a variety of data types, including caching solutions like Redis It is commonly used in online applications and serves as the database component of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) web application software stack.

MySQL is known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility.It can be used for a wide range of applications, from small to large-scale enterprise applications, and supports numerous operating systems including Linux, Windows, and macOS. Over the years, MySQL has become the go-to choice for many developers, particularly for web applications, due to its ease of use, performance, and strong community support; therefore, monitoring MySQL instances for better performance is becoming increasingly frequent.

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March 17, 2024 Educational No comments yet

What Is TCP & UDP Monitoring

In our last topic about Network Protocols, we have dicussed about different type of network protocols like TCP and UDP. Today we are going deeper into these two and learn more about it’s importance and how we can monitor them.

What is TCP UDP Protocol?

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) are two of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite, commonly referred to as TCP/IP. Both are used for sending bits of data—known as packets—over the internet but operate in significantly different ways, catering to different types of network applications. (more…)

March 15, 2024 Educational No comments yet
A vibrant digital illustration featuring a friendly robot with a screen-like face, a robotic hand reaching in, and floating geometric shapes. The text "SYNTHETIC MONITORING API - Application Programming Interface" is displayed on a blue and purple gradient background.

What is API Monitoring?

An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a set of rules, protocols, and tools for building software and applications. It specifies how software components should interact. APIs are used to enable the integration between different software applications, allowing them to communicate with each other without knowing the internal workings of each other’s software.

There are several types of APIs, including:

  1. Web APIs: These are designed for the web and usually provide access to services over the HTTP protocol. Examples include REST (Representational State Transfer), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and GraphQL APIs.
  2. Library/Framework APIs: These APIs are part of libraries or frameworks and allow developers to use their functionalities within their own code. For example, the jQuery library provides an API for simplifying HTML document traversing, event handling, and Ajax interactions.
  3. Operating System APIs: These provide functions for interacting with the operating system, such as file handling, creating and managing processes, and networking. An example is the Windows API (WinAPI) for Microsoft Windows operating systems.
  4. Database APIs: These enable communication with database management systems. They allow for creating, reading, updating, and deleting data in a database. SQL (Structured Query Language) is an example of a database API.

APIs play an important role in software development by encouraging code reuse and modular programming. They let developers to use certain features without having to create them from start, saving time and effort.

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March 14, 2024 Educational No comments yet

Ping vs Http monitoring – Which one to choose?

Understanding and diagnosing network issues is critical for any organization that uses the internet to interact with customers. Ping and HTTP monitoring are important resources for network managers and webmasters who want to keep their networks running smoothly and fix problems. Each tool has a distinct purpose, providing insight into various layers of network and application operation.

What is Ping Monitoring?

  • What it does: Ping monitoring uses the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) to check the availability of a network device (such as servers, routers, or switches) on the network. It sends a packet of data to a specific IP address and waits for a reply, measuring the time taken for the round-trip.
  • Purpose: Its primary purpose is to check the reachability of the host and the round-trip time (RTT) for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer.
  • Use Cases: It is widely used for basic network troubleshooting to check if a host is up and running on the network. It helps in identifying network connectivity issues and the presence of firewalls or network congestion.
  • Limitations: Ping monitoring does not provide information about the performance of higher-level protocols (like HTTP) or application-specific issues. It merely tells you if the host is reachable, not if a web service or application is functioning correctly.

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March 12, 2024 Comparison No comments yet
A modern isometric illustration representing HTTP monitoring, showing interconnected devices, a computer with analytics, and people interacting with technology.

What is HTTP Monitoring?

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) are protocols used to send and receive data over the Internet. They are essential for online communication and play a critical role in data flow between a user’s browser and a website.

In other words, it’s like entering https://xitoring.com into your browser.

HTTP

  • Stands For: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
  • Usage: It is used for transmitting and receiving information on the web.
  • Security: HTTP does not encrypt the data being transferred, which means it’s possible for unauthorized parties to intercept the data. This makes it less secure, especially for sensitive information.
  • Port: By default, it uses TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) port 80 for communication.

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March 11, 2024 Educational No comments yet