Tuesday, October 30, 2007

5 Monitors for Ultimate Business Performance: Part 2 Internal Monitor

2. Internal (a.k.a. Resource, Capacity Utilization, Server, Systems Health) Monitoring – continuously checks utilization of system resources. Small footprint agents need to be installed on client servers and desktops, which collect the CPU, memory, hard drive and network utilization data. Collected data then trasmited using http/https protocol to the central repository in order to be aggregated and presented on the user performance control dashboard. In case abnormalities detected for example missing a certain process or watching some of the resource at critical state, a notification will be send to the client.

It helps quickly diagnose or prevent the problem even before it affects user experience, also helps to optimize IT infrastructure investments.

Who should use it: IT operations and managers, webmasters, QA and web developers.

Usage examples: notification in case 100% CPU utilization, low memory, low hard disk space, terminated server process – for example Exchange Server or Database. In case of repeated pattern, then the owner may need to invest for example by adding CPU power or by creating server clusters. QA and Web developers may do load analysis.

Merging of Web Analytics and External Monitoring

Good blog post A view of the web analytics market. In the author words:

My take is also that monitoring will eventually be much closer to web analytics ... and end-to-end monitoring of the user experience will play a bigger role. It's obvious that a degraded web performance or poorly performing enterprise systems have a direct impact on conversion and outcomes on the frontline. Unless I'm mistaken, this is not measured by any of the ASP-based solutions.

That is actually what Monitis website performance monitoring service is providing. Having traffic and response time charts helps to notice a degraded web performance correlation with web load.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

5 Reasons for Merging Internal and Exteral Monitoring

Most on-demand website monitoring service providers only provide external website monitoring. Althoug being an important performance control service, external monitoring alone cannot identify the root cause of failures. Merging internal and external monitoring data provides the following benefits:

  1. Quickly indentify and fix the cause of failure or slow response, thus reducing site downtime.
  2. Fix the issue before it affects end-user experience
  3. Understand internal and external user experiences
  4. Check network latency and connection failure between you and your business partner and dependant web services.
  5. Find causes of past failures by analyzing historical data and plan appropriate infrastructure investments.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

5 Monitors for Ultimate Business Performance (part 1)

1. Availability (a.k.a. Uptime, Response Time, External, User Experience) Monitoring – continuously checks web sites and services availability. By simulating user behavior from geographically dispersed monitors measure page load time which directly related with user experience. Monitors also notify about outages and calculate uptime statistics for SLA (service level agreement) management.

It helps to improve online sells, customer satisfaction, and decrease web revenue loses.

Who should use it: IT, business managers, webmasters, Internet marketing, sells, web developers and PR staff.

Usage examples: control SLA of thirds party providers (e.g. ISP, hosting, blog providers), control own website SLA, IT operations monitoring and troubleshooting, SLA reporting, switching-off PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns at downtime (e.g. Adwords), setting and controlling uptime goals by product business owners, understanding of online sells trends, collaborate performance management applications, understanding of load issues.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Top global search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Baidu, MSN, NHN

According to comScore, more than 37 bln searches worldwide went through Google in August 2007. That’s about 60% of all searches, higher than Google’s 50% in the United States. Yahoo! was #2 worldwide with 8.5 bln, followed by Baidu at 3.3 bln, Microsoft Corp. at 2.2 bln and NHN at 2 bln. See http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071009/ap_on_hi_te/worldwide_search for more details.

Semonics, a new search engine visibility monitoring service provides web site position monitoring for most of regional Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines, and Baibu will be added soon.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

On-demand Website Performance Management and Monitoring service Monitis (www.monitis.com) adds new subscription plans. Monitis provides website availability, performance, and traffic monitoring services. In addition to the existed Free, Personal, Basic and Plus plans, Monitis now provides Personal+ and Basic+ plans. Monitis is one of most complete web systems performance monitoring services, which provides variety of metrics both for IT and Business users.