Webmasters and website owners will know how important it is to ensure their web applications are performing as expected for end users. Site24x7’s web application monitor makes it easier for them to keep track of the availability and performance of web applications such as customer logins or shopping cart purchases. The monitor sends out notifications if it detects any problem with the transaction, such as an unwanted downtime or a slow response time.
An important use of web application monitor, which sometimes gets overlooked, is its ability to assist in fine-tuning the performance of applications. Since the monitor provides you with historical data of key performance metrics, you gather a substantial amount of useful information about your web application over the course of time. This information can be used to proactively improve your web application and make it an absolute joy for customers to interact with.
Scott Savage has explained this beautifully in his blog. In fact, he mentions Site24x7’s web application monitor as one of his top 3 tools for fine-tuning web applications.
Some excerpts: Performance Monitoring – It is a great idea to do user testing and time how long it takes to follow a path through your application, for example logging into your web-based CRM application, searching with some set terms, returning a result and then displaying the details of this result. You can time it in a user session, providing you with valuable (but once off) time information about user scanning and data entry time. How does this time differ at 9am Monday versus 3am Thursday? A web application performance monitoring tool like site24×7 allows you to run this path automatically every 5 minutes, 24×7. This not only allows you to check your servers are serving your application at a consistent time, but even just serving it at all. It will email you immediately when your application stops responding, send you a weekly performance summary report, show you performance from multiple locations around the world and even help you independently track your SLA compliance (and even publish all this via an API or public page).
Don’t wait for your customers to call you and complain, these tools make feedback easy, even to the point where users are providing it instantly without even realising. The next step is using these tools to proactively improve your web application, which of course is easier said than done. Just remember you have to measure before you can manage.
