Many companies are dependent on a high-performing, available website to conduct business. Whether it's an online store, a landing page for customer acquisition or online support, web performance is critical to business success. Downtime means lost dollars, and long-term problems can put the business at serious risk. Some estimates have put the cost of downtime and outages into the hundreds of billions per year.
IT departments often try to protect against downtime by focusing on the web application. Monitoring web application's performance helps identify malfunctions and their cause on a code level, so that the DevOps team can solve the problem. But, monitoring application performance only protects against application errors and ignores external factors such as network traffic, hardware, connectivity issues or bandwidth usage, all of which can have an impact performance and availability of a website.
When website performance is poor, any individual component can be responsible. Worse, the search for the root cause can be time consuming and difficult. The best way for IT departments to approach this specific problem, therefore, is not to focus on which point solutions solve specific problems, but to engage in preventative maintenance of all systems. If the systems administrator constantly monitors all of the components involved in a website process, they can baseline normal patterns and set ranges that alert to anomalous behavior.
Collecting that type of data is extremely useful in anticipating issues and identifying them before they become problems. The main goal for IT in this instance is not to establish efficient backup and recovery processes, but instead, to prevent the types of issues that lead to failures and outages altogether. Additionally, over time administrators can optimize systems and process based on historical data, which only increases the resiliency of the website and enhances overall performance.
Administrators looking to monitor website health performance in a more holistic way need to find a solution that can comprehensively monitor all aspects of the IT environment. To monitor the website end-to-end, IT would have to take the following steps:
1. Website monitoring via ping
2. Monitoring page load times
3. Web server monitoring (Microsoft Internet Information Services IIS, Apache, nginx)
4. Transaction monitoring
5. Out-of-box monitoring of common devices and applications, such as servers, switches, routers, databases and firewalls
6. Support of standard protocols for monitoring data streams such as SNMP, NetFlow and Packet Sniffing
7. Monitor virtual applications
If an administrator can put in place a comprehensive monitoring strategy that can track every aspect of the website process, they will be able to identify issues before they become problems, decrease downtime, and protect a mission-critical business process.
Dirk Paessler is CEO and Founder of Paessler AG.
The Latest
Broad proliferation of cloud infrastructure combined with continued support for remote workers is driving increased complexity and visibility challenges for network operations teams, according to new research conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom ...
New research from ServiceNow and ThoughtLab reveals that less than 30% of banks feel their transformation efforts are meeting evolving customer digital needs. Additionally, 52% say they must revamp their strategy to counter competition from outside the sector. Adapting to these challenges isn't just about staying competitive — it's about staying in business ...
Leaders in the financial services sector are bullish on AI, with 95% of business and IT decision makers saying that AI is a top C-Suite priority, and 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage, according to Riverbed's Global AI and Digital Experience Survey ...
SLOs have long been a staple for DevOps teams to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure ... Now, as digital trends have shifted, more and more teams are looking to adapt this model for the mobile environment. This, however, is not without its challenges ...
Modernizing IT infrastructure has become essential for organizations striving to remain competitive. This modernization extends beyond merely upgrading hardware or software; it involves strategically leveraging new technologies like AI and cloud computing to enhance operational efficiency, increase data accessibility, and improve the end-user experience ...
AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...
If you were lucky, you found out about the massive CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage last July by reading about it over coffee. Those less fortunate were awoken hours earlier by frantic calls from work ... Whether you were directly affected or not, there's an important lesson: all organizations should be conducting in-depth reviews of testing and change management ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 11, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) ...
On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...