The Uptime.com Global Uptime Test is a free tool that measures the response time of your website from different locations around the world. It’s designed to provide site owners a quick review of how their site is performing from multiple locations in a single query.
- Using the Global Uptime Test
- Use Case - Catching Slow Server Speeds from a Single Location
- Final Thoughts
Using the Global Uptime Test
To find the Global Uptime test, either visit Monitoring > Global Uptime from your dashboard, or access the Global Uptime test from the Uptime.com Free Tools menu on the homepage. The functionality is the same for registered or non-registered users, but registered users will view tests within the Dashboard.
Enter the URL you wish to test, and Uptime.com will run a real-time report of your site’s infrastructure. This tool checks the following parameters:
DNS Servers
This parameter measures the time it takes to perform a DNS lookup and send a Web page request.
Time to Connect
The time it takes to establish a connection to your website.
Redirects
Measured in milliseconds, this time represents time spent redirecting before seeing any meaningful bytes of content.
TLS
Measures the time taken to negotiate a secure SSL or TLS connection.
Request Time
Time taken to request the HTML content for the URL being tested from the server.
First Byte
Time from request to receipt of the first meaningful byte of HTML data. This represents the time for the server to receive and process the request.
The tool also displays your Total Load Time, Size of the files and Download Speed that represents how quickly your server was able to serve the files. Finally, Uptime.com lists the remote IP used to perform this test.
Because these results are reported in real-time, the test does take some time to complete. The progress bar indicates the test status.
Individual location data is reported as each responds, so you can see which regions are first to reach your servers in addition to overall progress.
Use Case - Catching Slow Server Speeds from a Single Location
For this use case, our business is based in the US. We sell airplane equipment primarily to pilots based in Australia, but have noticed that our traffic from only that region has slowed to a crawl.
Using Global Uptime, we can run a test and compare server data. Our visualization indicates that Australian requests are particularly slow, and provides us some clues we can use for root cause analysis. For this case, we’ve noticed our DNS lookup is unusually high, and when we re-run the test it times out.
We should check the integrity of our own DNS servers immediately, then look for other causes once we’ve verified our infrastructure is working.
After some research, our team discovered a DNS outage in Australia that is causing the problem. Though we need to wait for someone else to resolve the issue, we can monitor our own infrastructure and re-run these tests to confirm functionality is restored.
Final Thoughts
The Global Uptime tool is very useful when you notice inconsistencies in traffic where you should be expecting more. Site speed is a commonly overlooked factor in lost traffic, and the Global Uptime tool provides data on various sources for site slowness.
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