Which Real Browser Do I Use to Monitor My Site’s Performance?

Which browser should I use to monitor my site’s performance? Should I test for all the most popular browsers? IE still has the majority of users in the market place—but shouldn’t I also test with Firefox?‖
Testing with a real IE browser is the most effective strategy because of the IE audience and because open web standards do not require you to conduct extensive testing using multiple real browsers – you gain the most by testing first using IE. Another reason to test with IE is that application developers often testing their applications using Firefox, only to have the application fail or not perform well when IE users begin to use it. Since most of the other browsers support the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) features and standards, testing for the most complex browser (IE) is recommended.

The two most widely used browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, with over two-thirds of the market worldwide—nearly 70% of site visitors use these two browsers.

Ask yourself the fundamental question, ―Which browser is our customer base using, and is our Web performance being monitored with that real browser or an imitation browser?

Related Links

1. Why Testing Web 2.0 Sites Requires Real Browser Measurements

2. Website Availability Monitoring 

3. Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience  4. Mobile Browser Compatibility

Website Monitoring 101 - Part II

This is the second part in the 'Website Monitoring 101' series in which we are going to move away from the basics of ‘website monitoring’ to start looking at how you utilize this.

If you have not done so, it is recommended you read over Website Monitoring 101 - Part I first.

Advantages of Website Monitoring
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. A good vendor offers several advantages:

• 24x7 monitoring of all key areas of Website and Web applications

• Quick and accurate notification of problem when it occurs notification

• Web-based real-time reporting of historical data

• Easy setup and immediate results, with no software or hardware to maintain

• Multiple Internet location monitoring for a holistic view of end-to-end connectivity for geographically distributed users

• An accurate view from the end-user perspective

And just in case you’re wondering what are the features of a good website monitoring services to stand as a big player in the industry, I will start to explain in the next section so that you have a better understanding of what is necessary to work with website monitoring services profitably.
Conclusion
In this part, we have moved beyond looking at the ‘advantages’ widely known aspects of successful website monitoring.

Related Links
1. Website Performance Monitoring
2. Web Page Monitoring
3. Site Monitoring Software

Mobile website or HTML5 app.

HTML5 was heralded as the magic that would allow developers to build websites that would work on any and every platform. While some of that promise has been realized, it’s not proven completely to be the hoped-for panacea. It does generally work well, though not without the need for tweaks to ensure proper functionality across many devices.

HTML5 can be used to make a cross-platform mobile website, or a mobile website that masquerades as an app. Its advantages are that it is cheaper to build; largely cross-platform compatible; easy to update; available through any browser, and therefore discoverable through search; and easier to test than apps.

The downside is HTML5 mobile websites are slower than apps and cannot leverage all of the device’s functionality, such as camera, GPS, etc.

Hybrid. Is it an app or isn’t it? Sometimes only the developer knows for sure. A hybrid app takes an HTML5 website and wraps it in a thin native wrapper. It attempts, with some success, to combine the best of both worlds: the easy updatability of an HTML5 site and some of the speed, offline capabilities, and native functionality of an app. It’s more affordable to build than a fully native app; is distributed through app stores; and requires similar testing to a native app.

Related Links:

App, Website, Or Both?

Fast, Fun & Touch-Friendly: The New Rules For Tablet Websites

Cloud application performance monitoring

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

The Elephant In The Cloud: Performance

For all of its tremendous potential, there’s one thing that will make or break the SaaS model both for vendors and users: Web Performance. No longer is technology contained within the walls of the enterprise, running on its own proven network, controlled closely by its own IT department. Now, the nerve center of the enterprise, the productivity of workers, the integrity of information assets is controlled by an outside entity, flows through the various pipes from a remote data center over the Internet into the enterprise’s network and ultimately, into a browser. And that presents challenges both for performance and user experience.


The problem with the browser being the front-end for SaaS applications is that users have very clear expectations of a browser experience, based on their use of the Web. Users go to a site and expect it to load fast — in two seconds or less. They don’t like to wait, and won’t. Google says that for every additional 500ms of delay, the site loses 20 percent of its traffic. With fast broadband and wireless connections everywhere, users expect blazing speed when they fire up their browser.


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

Web Performance Varies by Geography and Network

Unlike Web content downloads to desktops, mobile downloads can vary dramatically based on time of day, network operator used, and geographic location. For example, a mobile Website can take twice as long to download in San Francisco as compared to another operator in New York, London, or Tokyo. If a content-monitoring strategy does not include monitoring web content from various geographic locations, it is impossible to know what the end users are experiencing.

In the Web world, both the user interface and the delivery mechanism have been standardized for years, keeping mobile browser compatibility in mind. However, mobile content must be routed to the user through an operator network, and additional operator specific content may be added during the download. Also, different devices render content differently, so when the Web server detects a specific device type it may choose to send a variant of the generic content to the requesting device.

Read More

Unrealistic Load Testing Leads To Unrealistic Inferences

Website need to be tested under the most realistic conditions. These tests should be done using the arrival rates based on actual web logs and a real user – true to life scenario. This will help determine the revenue potential.

Earlier tests might have been conducted within your environment. But website performance testing would only be effective if conducted where the end users are. Unrealistic load testing leads to unrealistic inferences.  You will need true visibility into your end-user experience ensuring the success of your online business.

A big discrepancy in the page response times from different locations may point to the latency issues related to some backbones or the ten worst performing pages as the load level is increased indicating the pages causing performance bottlenecks.

Website Performance Monitoring: Quick Problem Detection and Triage

Triage is the process of performing just enough diagnosis to select the appropriate support team and convince them that the problem is truly theirs to solve. An effective triage system eliminates finger-pointing among the support groups and the resulting loss of valuable time. That time savings, repeated for each failure, can easily amount to many hours per month -- time that can be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more, in lost sales, performance penalties, and customer dissatisfaction. Triage works well if it can be performed quickly and reliably, so that its results are available almost immediately and so that the support teams trust those results. If it takes too long, or involves complex, difficult-to-use tools, or delivers questionable results, it will not be usable in a production environment. Support teams won't use it, or they won't trust the results, and the classic finger-pointing exercises will reappear.

Attempting a diagnosis with general-purpose tools, although possible in some cases, almost always increases the total time spent repairing the problem. It's far better to get the right team involved quickly with the right set of website monitoring services, instead of wasting large amounts of time trying to do a complete diagnosis without the best tools.

READ MORE