20 Top Sites' Performance

According to mon.itor.us weekly benchmark report for 20 top websites (by Alexa) the best response time for US and European markets was demonstrated by google.fr followed by google.com. The worst response time was demonstrated by www.baidu.com, Chinese search engine. Obviously they are not much concerned about their user experience from the United States and Europe. The following companies also show bellow average response time: www.yahoo.co.jp, www.hi5.com, www.friendster.com, www.msn.com, www.facebook.com, and www.youtube.com.

In uptime category the worst results were shown by www.friendster.com (98.6%). The following sites also were bellow average: www.facebook.com (99.5%), www.youtube.com (99.8%), www.hi5.com (99.8%).

5K Mon.itor.Us Agent Downloads

Mon.itor.Us announces 5,000 downloads of its Windows Smart Agent. The agent monitors hardware resource utilization per service and per process on Windows machines and notifies about abnormalities detected. Smart Agent also allows to use any of the customer machines for local monitoring. It is useful particularly for intranet applications and networks monitoring.

The agent based service is one of key differentiators for Mon.itor.Us. In contrast to other web uptime monitoring service, Mon.itor.Us not only provide external both also internal systems monitoring service, delivering one-stop solutions for webmasters and website owners. When it launched in March 2007 skeptics were predicting very limited usage of this feature because of security concerns. The facts although talk differently and 5k downloads proves that users really like this easy to use hosted service.

Mon.itor.Us premium service Monitis provides more advanced agent both for Windows and Linux machines.

50% discount on Monitis yearly plans

Monitis offers 50% discount on Basic and Plus yearly plans. Limited time offer expires Jan 7th, 2008.

One more usage scenario for Monitis internal monitor: how to check office/home connectivity

Although Internal Monitis monitoring was primarily designed to check Intranet applications and server resource utilization, it could also be used to check overall office connectivity. After being installed on a computer within the office network, a ping/http check can be added with an external URL e.g. www.google.com. The widget view will then show latency of connection in real time.

Web Performance Monitoring Metrics

We previously discussed 5 different types of web monitoring. Here is the list of important metrics that each of these services can provide for holistic web performance management.

Visitors Tracking

• Pages views
• Unique visitors
• New visitors
• Returned visitors
• Visitors distribution by countries and cities
• Browser statistics
• Max traffic
• OS statistics
• Referrers
• Entry pages
• Exit pages
• Time spent
• Conversion rate
• Most popular pages
• Common paths
• Search keywords

External Monitoring

• Response time from different external locations
• Uptime daily/monthly
• Average response time all location per URL
• MTTF (mean time to failure)
• MTTR (mean time to repair)
• Aggregated Uptime
• Incidents after working hours
• Average response time all web services
• Planned downtime
• Failures and notification

Internal Monitoring

• Server resource utilization (CPU, Memory, Network, HDD, Virtual Memory, Threads, Process)
• Total free disk space
• Number of alerts on exceeding system capacity thresholds
• Process resource utilization
• Response time local
• Process uptime
• Server uptime
• Uptime local

Online reputation Monitoring

• backlinks per SE
• indexes per SE
• position per keyword per SE
• social bookmarks
• references in blogs
• references in news
• page ranks

Transaction (application) Monitoring

• Failed transactions
• Coverage
• Total execution time
• Execution time per each step
• SLA figures (uptime)
• Page load breakdown
• Average execution per step

5 Monitors for Ultimate Business Performance: Part 5 Transactions Monitoring

5. Transactions (a.k.a. Application, Web Workflow, Functional) monitoring – monitors not only single web page but sequence of web screens and user actions. It allows checking functionally of web application logic and measure the performance of web transactions. A test script should be developed in order to perform such checks, either by automated recording of user actions or by writing the code manually. Monitis recently beta launched a transaction monitoring feature which allows to record, edit by hand, and debug test scripts. After recoding the script can be deployed on the server and then will be running on regular intervals. Users can see total execution time of script, but also can drill down to execution time per each step. In case of failure Monitis will send an alert. It also records screens which did not pass via checkpoints, thus allowing understanding the problem of failure later on. Finally it provides breakdown of load time per each component of the tested web pages.

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

Usage examples: a tool for regression tests of live production or pre-live development servers, functional monitoring to make sure main application flows are functioning, performance management and tuning.

5 Monitors for Ultimate Business Performance: Part 4 Search Position Monitoring

4. Search Position (a.k.a. Search Visibility, Online Reputation, Search Ranking, Site Popularity) monitoring – monitors website position on search engine result pages (SERP). Search engine optimization work requires monitoring position of website URL per many keywords, sometimes several hundreds, and per several search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and others including country specific ones like Baidu in Chine and Yandex in Russia. Doing manual checks is time consuming and doesn’t show historical progress. There are several expensive software available to automate this task, but there is a new on-demand search engine monitoring service which can do the work on monthly subscription bases. It also monitors social media and bookmarking sites.

Who should use it: business owners, search engine marketing and optimization consultants, webmasters.

Usage examples: progress monitor and reporting tool for search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns, competitive research, online reputation and buzz monitoring, brand management.