Why is external network monitoring important and different from provider monitoring?
Some hosting companies provide network monitoring. Although there are critical differences between the provider’s internal monitoring and external network monitoring service like monitor.us. First, internal monitoring checks if the server and/or certain processes are up. Providers don’t check if a specific URL is available. So they can check that web server is up, but they would not check if your application is really functioning.
Another difference is that internal monitoring is watching the servers from within the provider’s data center (see on the picture). For you it means that you will get false positive report if the problem is on the firewall, router or external connectivity level. It is very possible that the firewall can be attacked through a Denial of Server attack (DoS), your application is not available during certain periods and you will not be notified. Another possibility is that due to network miscofiguration your application has poor visibility from certain geographical locations. Only external monitoring can ‘notice’ such an issue and notify you about site outages and report performance from end-user perspective.
Finally, hosting companies are interested in high uptime – you know what I mean …
