Website Monitoring – Should You Check Your Website for Uptime?
Websites are a crucial link with your customers in today’s world. You spend your hard earned money on making sure they have latest information, correct contact details, etc. Your content is relevant and targeting the correct audience. If it’s a web application then its functional flow, user interface design ease of use etc. are crucial. But they are not working for you if the app is not up 99.99% of time ( industry acceptable standard as nothing is perfect). All your hard work will go in vain if you cannot hold on to your customers and client since your site is not reliable. This article will cover how crucial web monitoring is to your web app.
All major corporations spend a lot of money to ensure their web applications are up nearly 100% of the time, they also spend a lot of money to know in advance when their site is about to go down. Hence they don’t have to wait for a customer’s feedback (rant) to know their application is down. Apps goes by reputation and popularity and a user goes to a site which is reliable, if he cannot get to a site he will definitely move on, faster than light to your competitor (also you won’t be notified of same). Web monitoring helps in sending alerts (emails, messaging, nationwide alert … you probably don’t want that) as soon as your web applications start having performance issues, slows down or about to die. Consider the user’s pain of losing all the information that he has filled and your site crashed?
There are a lot of monitoring applications out there which could be installed on the server (with a user dashboard and everything) you can setup as fancy a monitoring tool you want. They can store what is the measure of performance (how many seconds after click of a button ), from which all geography the application is being accessed (response time from all geography) whether all pages of the applications are accessible (note this is not functional testing just making sure pages are calling out). This can help you in identifying which area of the application is having an issue rather than digging through logs while your production environment is down. It can also notify if the server performance is going down so you can take appropriate action (fix it or call your host).