Website Monitoring 101 - Part III

Features of a Good Website Monitoring Service 

This is the final part in the 'Website Monitoring 101' series in which we are going to talk about ‘website monitoring features’ to start looking at how you utilize this.

Advanced Website monitoring services are capable of carrying out multistep Website transactions. They also offer several capabilities through a Website monitoring dashboard to set up tasks in Website monitoring accounts. Website monitoring features include,

• Complete monitoring and reporting for uptime and performance using user defined Web transactions
• Real browser-based Website monitoring for the most accurate read on performance
• Robust alerting mechanisms to deliver trouble notifications to multiple points
• Complete monitoring to ensure that there are no faults within pages, including examination of referenced objects, SSL certificates, and page content
• User-friendly transactional monitoring, with the ability to capture each business process
• Geographically dispersed monitoring locations so that Websites and Web applications using different Internet backbones can be accessed
• Root-cause analysis of problems when they occur

For maximum control over your site, Website monitoring must be transparent and the measurements it provides must be accurate. Keynote's efficient Website monitoring tools provide total visibility into the performance and functionality of your Website from an end user's perspective.


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Website Monitoring 101 - Part1

Welcome to the first part of ‘Website Monitoring 101’ series.

In this post series, we are going to examine all the ins and outs of website monitoring and more importantly, how you can maximize the effectiveness and ultimately the profitability of your website monitoring. Let’s begin by looking at what is website monitoring, how you use it and some of the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.

What Is Website Monitoring?

Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a Website or Web application from different locations through the day. Website monitoring is used to ensure that sites are live and responding to viewers, to generate trends that show performance over time, and highlight a range of factors that could affect the functionality of a Website. Website monitoring services also help you benchmark your Website against the performance of your competitors to help you determine how well your site is performing.

Keeping your Website performing consistently and available at all times is essential to the success of your online business. Website monitoring helps you ensure that your Website is functioning optimally and is accessible to Internet users every second. From checking Website average load time on a regular basis to alerting you of problems from locations around the world, a good vendor guarantees that your Website functions flawlessly.

Conclusion: In this first ‘What is Website Monitoring’, you have been introduced to why ‘Website Monitoring’ is so effective.

In next posts, we will expand on the information introduced in this first part by looking at some more advanced ‘website monitoring’ strategies, tactics and ideas.

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Web Page Monitoring from end user's perspective

Don't let your site go dark this holiday season.

Keynote is helping retailers to get ready for the holiday shopping season with a free offer for website monitoring and mobile testing. Retailers, in particular, have no time to waste to prepare for this coming holiday shopping season. Mobile is expected to be responsible for retail site visits during this year's holiday season.

Keynote Web Performance Monitoring allows you to:

• Obtain accurate, real-time data about your site’s overall performance, speed and availability
• Measure rich Internet applications and track the performance of third party content on your site
• Know how your shoppers in New York City, San Francisco and any other city around the world may be experiencing you site

Be sure your site can handle the traffic on Black Friday, Cyber Monday or any other day of the week – 24 / 7/ 365.

Get your 7 days of free website monitoring – today.*


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Filtering Out Web Performance Monitoring Traffic From Google Analytics

If you're a webmaster, site owner, or digital business manager, picture this scenario. You open your Google Analytics dashboard and you see a big spike in traffic. At first, you're really excited - wow, look at all those site visitors! You run off to tell your boss that she can give you that bonus she promised if you got that online marketing campaign to work. And then... you learn that someone in the Site Ops team added web performance monitors, and so it's all so-called robots - synthetic traffic generated for the purpose of keeping tabs on your site's response time and availability.

You think, no problem, I could filter that out from Google Analytics, and then you learn you can't. It's always going to be there, like, forever. You go crazy, emailing the GA team, posting on forums, and then slowly resign yourself to forever dealing with that spike. It will disappear from your default view, maybe after a month, but that's a long month to wait. And heaven forbid if your execs ask you for a site traffic report for the past year, try explaining why you can't filter out that spike - what, you weren't thinking ahead? What kind of guy did we hire to run our online business, anyway?

Don't let this happen to your career. Plan ahead and learn how to use Google Analytics to filter out all web performance monitors from your site analytics reports. Here's the link: http://blogs.keynote.com/the_watch/2012/08/filtering-out-web-performance-monitoring-traffic-from-google-analytics.html

Measuring site performance over an actual cellular network

As fundamental as it may seem, many site owners don’t alter their approach at all when tackling a mobile site project. Call it “desktop thinking,” or terrestrial, landline, wireline thinking — by any name, it ignores the fundamental reality of the cellular network, which as described above, is inherently slower and riddled with opportunities for performance degradation.

One common desktop tactic that causes issues in mobile is the URL redirect, which instructs the browser to follow a different URL than the one originally requested. There are a number of legitimate reasons to employ this technique — to direct users to your third-party site host; to offer nicknames that provide multiple paths to the main site; or to send users to a site designed specifically for the detected browser.

This is generally a fine practice in the desktop browser world, where redirects usually happen in the blink of an eye and are virtually undetectable to the user. Use the same technique on a mobile site, though, where the big “L” — latency — colors the entire experience, and you end up with users staring and staring at a screen where nothing’s happening.

Surprisingly, even some of the biggest retailers have mobile sites bogged down with URL redirects. The problems become apparent when measuring site performance over an actual cellular network (as opposed to a WiFi connection).

At what point does the user come to the conclusion that the site’s not working, or that it’s not worth the wait? If they’ve just navigated from a well-built mobile site that loaded quickly, there’s a good chance they’re not going to wait eight seconds. How likely is it that they’ll come back again? How likely they’ll tell their friends about the experience? Forget what that means in terms of a lost sale. What does it mean for retailer X’s brand image?

Read More

Tablet Problem? Or Tablet Opportunity?

Yes, it’s another form factor, and more operating system permutations, still more network connection considerations, and additional development expense. But tablets could actually be a bright spot for content owners looking to attract audience and advertising dollars.

This past holiday season, iPad users showed themselves to be valuable customers, buying more and spending more than other mobile shoppers. And a number of studies indicate that tablet users are avid content consumers as well.

More than three-quarters of tablet owners use their device every day, on average for 90 minutes. More than half use it daily to get their news, and many now spend more time on news than they did pre-tablet. In fact, the only thing they’re more likely to use their tablets for than news is to browse the Web.

These numbers are likely skewed, as most current tablet owners have pricey iPads; they tend to be higher-income, better educated, often middle-aged consumers. As the market expands down to lower-priced Kindle Fires and others, tablet demographics will likewise gravitate toward a more mass consumer profile.

Read More: http://keynote.com/benchmark/SaaS/article_three_screen_optimization.shtml

The impact of web load testing on performance

What drives the financial impact of a site outage or performance issues is abandonment. It’s important to understand that visitors experiencing a Website with issues don’t result in lost revenue, per se. Only when those visitors don’t return, and/or go somewhere else is revenue lost. A shopper’s tolerance for errors is called “tenacity” in Web load testing parlance. Low tenacity shoppers bail from slow searches and hanging shopping carts in a dash.

If a load test had been run that adequately modeled the impact of the planned launch, the damage would have been done outside business hours and Target management would have been able to decide whether to make changes to their systems and retest, postpone or restructure the launch or just "risk it" and see what happens.  We don't really think they ever had the chance to make those decisions.  Surely they didn't conduct a load test that predicted such an epic fail.  But should they have?

Realistic Web load tests model site usage and shopper behavior. Systems are deployed to simulate high levels of demand from multiple geographically disperse areas. Once the load is generated, the infrastructure and application’s response are watched carefully to identify bottlenecks and breakage points as the entire mesh of the Website’s interconnecting parts are stressed. Only this level of testing can accurately inform e-commerce teams of their preparation adequacy.

Read More

Improve Performance Of Third-Party Components

A slick-looking Web site is ultimately of limited effectiveness if all of the its bells and whistles are an impediment to system performance. Hence, the monitoring of system performance at the end-user/UI level is extremely important to ensuring a consistently excellent user experience. By using the proper website performance tools in a targeted manner, both business managers and developers can effectively monitor the impact of third-party performance both on the individual component level and in the aggregate.

The more complex your Web site is, the more likely it is that its performance – and possibly your profit margin - is in the hands of third parties and their components running on your site. Ideally, we want to improve the performance of these third-party components (aka “widgets”), so that a page loads just as fast with these widgets as without them.

If you are the owner of the Web site, there are at least two ways to improve overall site performance. One is to optimize the Web site itself for each widget so that those widgets running on the page will be more efficient, a method that is not cost-efficient. The other, more cost-effective option is to use continuous and focused website performance monitoring. Breaking down performance by time and by component category allows you to pinpoint the components that adversely impact Web site performance. 

Read More on The Benefits of Third-Party Content Monitoring

Challenges of creating and managing robust applications

Application availability is the first quality encountered by customers, but the last one to be determined by the development process, because it depends on the quality of everything else that happens during design, development, and testing web applications. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and developing RIAs will uncover any weaknesses in an enterprise’s development and SLM processes.

RIAs inevitably involve running complex code on the client, and use more complex and application-specific strategies to manage the communication between browser and server. Making such complex code efficient and bugfree is not a task to be taken lightly.

Better tools are needed to help us meet the challenges of creating and managing robust applications; today, while the Adobe suite of Flash tools is a little more mature, Ajax development and application performance testing tools are still in their infancy. The Open Ajax initiative may help to address this issue. Therefore deploying an RIA successfully will demand more resources— skills, tools, process, time, and (of course) money—than would be required to deploy a more traditional Web-based application in which all application logic is executed on the server. Enterprises that decide to employ the technology must be prepared to invest more in design, development, testing and management to make it successful.

Read More on Rich Internet Applications. 

Challenges And Surprises With Web Load Testing

To gauge a Web site’s capacity and scalability, web load testing is one of the most effective ways. But the load tests need to simulate real scenarios. The huge numbers and ranges of variables involved in Web site load testing will always present challenges and surprises.

A load testing scenario can be made significantly more realistic by simulating the behavior of tolerant and

an intolerant user. Familiarity is a major factor in how quickly a simulated user navigates from one page to the next. As with latency tolerance, different people will behave in different ways: users that are very familiar with the Web site move more rapidly (therefore creating more load per unit of time) than users who are visiting the Web site for the first time and need to read and understand how the Web site is organized to go from one page to the next.

You can also run simple in-house experiments using employees and their friends and family to determine, for example, the page viewing time differences between new and returning users.

Read More on Web Based Testing and Website Monitoring. 

Website Monitoring Service Must Haves

 From checking Website average load time on a regular basis to alerting you of problems from locations around the world, a good Website monitoring service guarantees that your Website functions flawlessly. Website monitoring helps you ensure that your Website is functioning optimally and is accessible to Internet users every second.

A Website that is frequently inaccessible is likely to destroy customer loyalty and lose business. Ensuring that all of the elements of a Website are functioning properly is critical to maximizing your company's Web investment.For maximum control over your Website, Website monitoring must be transparent and the measurements it provides must be accurate.

Know More on Website Monitoring Service.

Enterprises must re-evaluate their approach to website performance management

In an RIA, the time to complete a Web page download may no longer correspond to something a user perceives as important, because (for example) the client engine may be prefetching some of the downloaded content for future use. 

Standard tools that measure the time for Web page downloads to complete can record misleading data for RIAs. In some cases, the client engine may not even invoke any standard Web page downloads once the application is launched, using asynchronous background communications for all server requests.

To implement RIAs successfully, enterprises must re-evaluate their approach to website performance  management. Instead of relying on the definition of physical Web pages to drive the subdivision of application response times, RIA developers or tool users must break the application into logical pages.

Read More on this topic.