Site24x7 is fine, and does what it needs to
July 26, 2019
Site24x7 is fine, and does what it needs to
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Site24x7
Site24x7 is currently used within the IT department to monitor outages, both internal and external. If a server or website goes down, we rely on Site24x7 to alert IT staff. Since our website and associated servers need to have maximum uptime, knowing immediately that one or more are down is required for business, even if it happens outside of normal operating hours.
- Alerts: Site24x7 can be configured to send alerts in all sorts of ways, from email, to text messages, to even direct automated phone calls.
- Internal monitoring: An agent installed on one or more machines can monitor internal connectivity to other network devices. This means if connectivity to a server goes down, we often know about it before users alert us.
- External monitoring: Site24x7 also watched our websites and sends alerts if they're unreachable. It uses multiple locations to do so, which means if there's a partial network outage in some part of the country, we know who is affected.
- Analysis: Site24x7 sends a report when a site is back up, with an "analysis" of the outage. The idea is to help pinpoint the cause, but it's almost always useless.
- Overalerting on larger outages: Site24x7 sends an alert on every site that we have configured when they go down. A hierarchical setup would be better, or some way for it to recognize that if more than two sites are down simultaneously, it only needs to send one alert with that information. Getting 12 text messages at 1 AM is not fun.
- Complex setup: It takes a long time to set up everything for monitoring. Automation would be nice.
- Reduced downtime: We've reduced downtime because the alerts from Site24x7 get us working on a problem immediately.
- Less required manpower: We do not need additional staff overnight or an outside contractor to monitor the network since we get alerts ourselves.
- False alerts: We do occasionally get false alerts, which causes time spent after hours tracing a problem that does not exist.
The biggest difference between Site24x7 and products like PRTG, Nagios, or Icinga, is that Site24x7 is hosted off the network, completely externally. The others do a great job on network alerts-- and some can even be configured to send SMS or phone calls with the right equipment and plugins-- but they usually reside in the network or at least on-site. Hosting them in the cloud might be a way around that, in which case they would be pretty similar to Site24x7 in capability, but without the additional software costs in the case of Nagios and Icinga (both open source).