Pingdom Review

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Pingdom Review 2024

Pingdom is a website monitoring tool created by Solarwinds. The product was designed specifically for IT companies, e-commerce store owners, website developers, and other digital professionals who need a comprehensive monitoring tool. Pingdom provides numerous key statistics that give insight into critical performance indicators. Learn more about this tool in the 2023 Pingdom Review.

Pingdom Overview

Pros
  • Pingdom is not just one monitoring tool but a product that comes with several different monitoring services that provide different useful statistics and measurements about website performance
  • Custom notifications can be set up to alert you in case of downtime issues or other user experience complications 
  • Dashboards and reports can be customized to ensure you have the most pertinent website performance information at your fingertips 
  • A 30-day free trial allows customers to see how Pingdom can help them before making a full commitment
CONS
  • There is a significant learning curve for new users, and as such, the initial configuration can prove troublesome 
  • Pricing can be misleading as you must select the services and capacity you need 
  • Pricing can be expensive for customers who need a lot of resources
Key Features
  • Real user monitoring gives detailed insight into how users experience a website in terms of usability, page load speeds, and page views
  • Transaction monitoring produces near real-time statistics about transaction executions allowing website owners or managers to ensure the servers and applications are functioning properly 
  • Uptime monitoring tools make sure that your websites are stable and provide insight into any server failures
  • Root cause analysis gives greater insight into the reason behind any failures with your server architecture and helps prevent future failures and recurrences

What is Pingdom?


Pingdom is a website monitoring tool designed to be a comprehensive solution measuring all pertinent website statistics. The tool was created for online business owners, website owners, digital marketing agencies, website developers, and entrepreneurs who need to monitor their websites’ performance. Pingdom has plenty of features such as dashboards, reports, uptime testing, transaction monitoring, page speed loading, and much more.

Who is Pingdom for?


Pingdom was designed for people whose work revolves around websites and their functionality. The list includes web developers, website owners, e-commerce store owners, and digital agencies who manage websites. 

Web developers will find Pingdom to be a great tool to see how the website they built performs. Pingdom gives web developers insight into important considerations like page load speed and transaction times. 

Website owners can monitor important metrics that explain their users’ experience. Real user metrics reports, uptime monitoring, and transaction monitoring all provide useful insight into how users interact with their websites.

E-commerce store owners can use dashboards to visualize how well their stores are performing thanks to useful metrics like bounce rate and active sessions. What’s more, Pingdom can give e-commerce store owners more knowledge about where most of their clients are coming from. 

Digital agencies can take advantage of Pingdom as a full-stack monitoring service allowing them to get all the necessary metrics aggregated in one place. This reduces the complexity of their work and allows for simple website management. 

Pingdom Performance Monitoring


Pingdom provides complete performance monitoring services aggregating data for key indicators such as transaction speed, page speed, and uptime monitoring.

Transaction monitoring is a key subset of website performance that’s measured by monitoring how long it takes a user to perform a specific task. Pingdom monitors transactions like account signup, account login, and search functions. The tool also reviews downloadable media and files to ensure that they aren’t flawed or broken. 

Page speed monitoring is one of the most important factors for a website’s success. Pingdom tracks webpage’s loading speeds to ensure there are no delays or issues with pages loading. These statistics help website owners identify areas where they can improve and provide a better user experience. 

Pingdom’s uptime monitoring feature performs website availability checks every minute to ensure that servers are functioning properly. These automatic checks come from over 60 locations around the globe helping to ensure that websites are available worldwide.

Additional Features


Beyond the main monitoring services Pingdom offers, the tool comes with many other features that benefit users. Pingdom users can set up custom notifications to be alerted whenever the tool finds website related issues like HTTPs errors, content changes, server errors, and more. Notifications can be set up to send alerts via SMS, email, or in the application only.

Pingdom provides users with workflow tools like dashboards and reports to easily analyze website performance from one place. Reports show trends and how performance has changed over time giving greater insight into how structural changes may have affected website performance. 

Pingdom also easily integrates using webhooks with other software products like Slack, PagerDuty, and HipChat. Clients can find plenty of documentation on using webhooks with Pingdom to get started.

Pingdom Interface


Pingdom’s interface is simple yet comprehensive. The main dashboard aggregates and organizes all the useful statistics into a meaningful representation of how users are interacting with a website. Navigating the user interface to find more detailed analysis reports and statistics is intuitive. 

The only downfall of the Pingdom interface is due to the comprehensive nature of the tool. New users will experience a learning curve as they navigate the tool to find the information they’re looking for or a feature they’d like to explore.

Pricing


Pingdom’s pricing structure is a bit complex as pricing heavily depends on the desired number of checks and alerts. The company offers two main options—synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring. 

Synthetic monitoring includes proactive web monitoring of web applications and the performance, availability, and page transactions. This plan also has features such as unlimited users, email and SMS alerting, and public status pages and reports. Synthetic monitoring plans start at $10.00 per month with the following resources — 10 uptime checks, 1 advanced check, and 50 SMS alerts. Moving up to 90 uptime checks, 20 advanced checks, and 350 SMS alerts raises the price to $95.00 per month. 

Real user monitoring includes troubleshooting and monitoring from the user's perspective thereby giving a more nuanced vision of a website’s quality. This premium plan supports unlimited websites, unlimited users, shareable reports, and 13-month data retention. The real user monitoring plan pricing starts at $10.00 per month for 100,000 page views. For 1 million page views, the plan costs $75.00 per month.

Alternatives to Pingdom


Pingdom is one of the more well-known website monitoring tools available. However, it’s not without its competitors. 

New Relic is a complete monitoring tool built for engineers to monitor and debug their application from end to end. The platform includes website monitoring, synthetic monitoring, browser monitoring, model performance monitoring, network monitoring, and much more. 

Site 24x7 is another similar tool. It helps website owners monitor their websites’ performance and their users’ experience. The tool includes features like server monitoring, cloud monitoring, log management, network monitoring, application monitoring, and real user monitoring. 

Datadog is an alternative that offers complete monitoring and security features for any stack and application. The tool offers application monitoring, database monitoring, network performance monitoring, real user monitoring for browser and mobile, log management, audit trail, and much more.

Final Thoughts


Pingdom is a complete website monitoring tool created to make the lives of website owners, e-commerce store owners, and website managers easier. The tool monitors key performance indicators such as page load speed, transaction speed, uptime, and more. All the statistics collected help website users determine where their websites excel and where improvements may be made. Although Pingdom may be pricey for clients who need a lot of resources and capacity, the tool is valuable and will help website owners maintain a positive user experience.

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