BrowserMob, an on-demand performance and load testing software service, is launching a new monitoring tool that lets you measure the performance of your website over time, and alert you of problems. BroswerMob, which is a cloud-based service, is designed to help lower-trafficked websites (i.e. websites with less than one million visitors each month) prepare for potentially high traffic situations, such as a launch. BrowserMob presented its sites testing product at TechCrunch’s Cloud Computing Roundtable in February.
The monitoring tool checks your website from multiple locations in the cloud, using ta variety of browsers, captures screen shots of your website whenever it detects an error and notifies you immediately when these problems take place. The technology also detects problems outside of your firewall (ad vendor problems, issues with external widgets, etc.).
Patrick Lightbody, the founder of BrowserMob, says that he started the business because he found that there wasn’t a low-cost alternative for startups and SMBs which wanted to test out their sites for traffic and track performance. BrowserMob’s monitoring service is free for low-volume monitoring (the tool will check the site every hour) and starts at $30 per month for more in-depth coverage.
Though BrowserMob is focused on the smaller sites, the startup, which launched in 2008, has some big-name clients, such as Evite. Competitors to BrowserMob include Keynote Systems and AlertSite.
You misspelled “Browser” in the title!
Sounds like a copy of http://www.alertfox.com/ to me.
Sounds like a copy of http://www.gomez.com/ to me.
why is this news? not really a unique service IMO, just google for “website monitoring” to get an idea. Most services around offer quite a bit more functionality for the same price
Sounds like a copy of http://www.watchmouse.com/ to me.
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Browsermob’s actually pretty damn nice.
I haven’t found any other load test provider that uses real browsers (downloads and runs all the JS, renders the CSS, DLs images. + u get actual screenshots), has a self service web interface & clocks in at a reasonable price.
I’ve used BrowserMob a number of times over the last 3 months to load test various projects and I’m excited to see this new monitoring service launched. We explored a number of load testing services that were way beyond our budget before we found BrowserMob. Their service offers easy access to low level results (time for each resource, time to first byte) as well as a more real world evaluation since it uses real browsers for the tests. It was exactly what we needed and was surprisingly affordable for our small business.
at least I know about some of sites offer this kind of service
I haven’t been able to find another service that is able to perform load testing and monitoring services using real browsers. Most of the errors I find on my website are due to 3rd party ad networks that use flash ads that break my websites layout or cause slow page loads. With BrowserMob I am able to track down exactly which ad network is responsible. Thank you BrowserMob!
It is a product like others on the market but like many have mentioned earlier it uses real web browsers which makes it extremely efficient and the price point competitive with the smaller brands and cheaper than major players (e.g., Mercury). Sound product with some good functionality.
Patrick Lightbody was my college roommate. My mom loved him because he was always home when she would call and I wasn’t. Sorry Pat, had to out you.
The guy was a full-time engineer at Cisco as a 17 year old and one of the all-time great minds I have known – (although everyone else I know wakes up in a gutter, confused as to their whereabouts).
I can honestly say Pat will never, EVER, let any one of his clients down. (He spends all that time at home, what else is he going to do?)
Great job Pat. Good luck!
How is this cheap when there are so many free like this including http://247webmonitoring.com/ and mon.itor.us
I’ve used BrowserMob before and it actually IS very different than other copy-cat services out there, and a great tool. Not only does it use real browsers for testing, but also delivers more valuable data and analytics to webmasters that other ‘fly-by-night’ services I’ve used don’t (not to mention they’re not reliable).
I think this is a very useful service for the following reasons:
1) Although such services exist, they are usually quite complex and just include way too many features or the features are hard to use.
2) Such services are not cheap.
I think BrowserMob is playing in a niche market here. For the big companies, they may need the expensive services with complex features. But for smaller startups, there isn’t anything out there that is cheaper and provides a nice bundle of features to monitor the website health.
I use both Pingdom and Browermob, I like them both, they do different things. Oh, and Hyperic too. They all monitor stuff, differently.
There’s plenty of free monitoring apps for your blog or small site that just ping and send emails. There are also cheap services (like Pingdom) that can check a page every 5 min, store response times, and alert you via SMS if it’s not accessible from some part of the world. If that’s all you need, that’s awesome. I have a high-traffic site and, for various reasons, the “ping” checks from those services are not always enough.
I started using Browsermob’s load testing suite first, which has helped me at least twice in tracking down significant bottlenecks under high load. This new monitoring system provides more customization and in-depth results than I can get from Pingdom alone.
Sometimes I need to make sure the right *content* is showing up (Apache might be responding, but what if there is a problem with the database), sometimes (when I know my site is going to be hammered) I want to check *every minute* to see that it’s up and how fast it’s responding. On one occasion I needed proof that a 3rd party tracking image was loading slowly and blocking the rest of the content… you can’t do that with the free services.
Hopefully you get the idea – You can get simple free monitoring, and you can get crazy complicated and expensive monitoring. Browsermob fills the gap by letting you take what you need when you need it.
I’ve played around with this, and other, services, and I’m very impressed by the attention to detail and customer-centric design approach. This is a winner.
That’s really a hot filed.
AlertX.com is by far and away the most affordable site monitoring solution on the internet. While not as feature rich, it gives webmasters the basic tools needed to track their sites’ uptimes. Packages range from $19.99 a year to monitor 10 sites to $99.99 a year to monitor an unlimited number of sites. Try AlertX free for 90 days!
Is this a free service?