D3bris Choosing a website monitoring tool: criteria for agencies
What agencies should look for in a website monitoring tool: check types, intervals, locations, alerts, pricing model, data location and honest limits.
There are dozens of monitoring services, from free uptime checkers to observability platforms for large IT departments. For an agency looking after websites of small and mid-sized businesses, most of the differences come down to a few questions. This guide collects them – regardless of which tool you end up choosing.
1. What actually needs checking?
Start with your clients, not with the tool’s feature list:
- Is it enough to know whether the website is reachable?
- Or do enquiries and revenue depend on specific subpages that should be checked individually?
- Do forms or orders need to be tested end to end?
The differences between these levels are explained in uptime monitoring vs. functional checks. For most agency clients the middle level – key pages with content checks – is the sensible default.
2. Criteria at a glance
| Criterion | What to look for | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Check types | HTTP status, TLS certificate, subpages, expected text; possibly DNS, ports, browser tests | Determines which failures are detected at all |
| Interval | 1 to 5 minutes is common | Shorter means faster, but also more messages |
| Confirmation | Is a failure re-checked before alerting? | Decides how many false alarms you get |
| Check locations | One location or several, in which countries | Several locations detect regional problems better |
| Notifications | Email, SMS, phone, Slack/Teams, webhooks | Must match how you can be reached |
| Client structure | Can websites be grouped by client? | Essential for an overview across many clients |
| Reports, status pages | Shareable with clients, with your own branding? | Relevant if you sell monitoring as a service |
| Pricing model | per monitor, per website, per user, tiers | Determines how easily the cost fits into retainers |
| Data location and contract | Provider’s seat, servers in the EU, data processing agreement | Matters for your own data-protection records |
| Language | Interface and alerts in your clients’ language? | Helps when non-technical colleagues read alerts |
3. Look closely at the pricing model
Many providers charge per monitor, where a monitor is a single address or a single check type. If you want to watch the homepage, contact page and certificate of each client website, you quickly need three monitors per website. So calculate with your real number of websites and the number of pages you want to check on each.
An example: 20 client websites with three pages each are 60 monitors. In a per-website model, the same checks count as 20 websites.
4. Assess false alarms realistically
Ask specifically during the trial:
- How many failures does it take before an alert is sent?
- During a long incident, do you get one message or a new one every few minutes?
- What happens when the service itself has connectivity problems?
Run the tool on real client websites for one or two weeks during the trial and count the alerts that weren’t real problems.
5. Ask about honest limits
A serious provider says clearly what its service cannot do – for example whether JavaScript-generated content is evaluated, whether pages behind a login can be checked, or whether forms are actually submitted. Be wary of promises like “guaranteed to catch every outage” or “100 % availability”: no external monitoring can deliver that.
6. Questions for the trial
- Can I set up all my clients and websites in under an hour?
- Does a colleague without a technical background understand the outage email?
- How many false alarms were there in two weeks?
- What does the tool cost at my current number of websites – and at twice that?
- Can I cancel without a minimum term?
Where D3bris fits – and where it doesn’t
D3bris is built for agencies looking after websites of small and mid-sized businesses: websites grouped by client, up to three pages per website with expected text, TLS checks, one confirmed email per incident, a price per website and monthly cancellation.
D3bris is not the right fit if you need checks from several locations, SMS or phone alerts, client status pages, browser tests of checkouts or monitoring of servers and databases. Other tools are better suited for that.
Current plans are on the pricing page.