title: Reaching for five nines: ActiveWatch and SiteSeer
abstract: Every Web admin's dream is achieving the fabled five nines-99.999 percent uptime. To attain such availability, your Web site must be down no more than about five minutes per year. Technologies like RAID, clustering, and load balancing make this easier, but to actually track uptime, maintain auditable records, and discover patterns in failures to prevent downtime in the future, you'll need to set up external monitoring. Because your Internet connection is a key factor in measuring uptime, you must monitor your site from the Internet itself, beyond your firewall. You could monitor with custom software on remote hosts, or you could use one of the two reasonably priced services available: Mercury Interactive's ActiveWatch and Freshwater Software's SiteSeer. (Freshwater Software has been a subsidiary of Mercury Interactive for about a year now.) The two services offer a slightly different mix of features and target different markets. Both services offer availability and performance monitoring from several remote locations, alerts to email or pager, and periodic reports. They differ in what's most easily monitored, and in the way you interact with the services
keyphrases: Web site auditable records downtime external monitoring Internet connection performance monitoring remote locations periodic reports uptime tracking failure pattern discovery Mercury Interactive ActiveWatch Freshwater Software SiteSeer availability monitoring email alerts pager alerts