Website Monitoring: What should you monitor?

Published in

Fyipe

8 min readMay 18, 2018

Websites are the Web stores for nearly every business today. Bad performing website implies a bad store front which implies unhappy customers and the plummeting revenues. In the blog “Why do you need website monitoring today ?” , we discussed in detail the top reasons why website monitoring has become an absolute necessity for businesses where the major chink of revenue flows from their website.

Now that we are clear that we need website monitoring and the know about the pain that we could suffer if we don’t have it in place, it’s absolutely important that we know about the parameters that we must monitor so that we don’t end up wasting a lot of time confused and worried over things that wouldn’t matter a lot.

So, what should I monitor?

The internet is full of information and while this may seem like a good thing, it actually is really intimidating and confusing for business owners who have just just stepped into exploring the world of website monitoring and are not exactly aware of all the tech jargon. This leaves them in a state of confusion.
With this blog i hope i’m able to help you overcome this confusion. Let me start with reiterating something that you might already know. Every business has different requirement and hence different priorities.

Yeah! i know that. So what ?

What we miss is that this applies to website monitoring as well. Different businesses have different requirements and hence some parameters are more important than other for every business.

For instance, a broken link for a product on e-commerce site might be disastrous but the same broken link for a news website might not be so especially if the news is a few days old.

So losing sleep is justified for the e-commerce company but might not be really urgent for the news company. You get the point. Right?

But here’s the good news. There are some parameters which must be monitored by every business irrespective of the domain they operate in and we’ll discuss it below.

Technically, an organization can monitor everything that is possible to monitor externally and the local device performance such as server CPU, current memory and drive utilization, bandwidth consumed, as well as different system processes, status of services running on the server and system events.

However, to bring clarity the organization should have the following services up and running to ensure that they perform at their peak:

Uptime monitoring:

Uptime monitoring refers to regular checkup of availability and response time of a website from different locations across the world. This verifies that the website is available and fully operational from anywhere your customers want to access it. If a web page is not available, it means that the business is not available on the internet i.e., your business store is closed.

This might leave your potential customers dissatisfied and even worse will move them your competitors’ page. You should be the first person who is informed about any issue connected to your web page in order to react as quickly as possible or your competitors will steal your customers right away.

There are many protocols which can be used for uptime monitoring like HTTP, HTTPS, PING, DNS, PING, FTP, TCP, UDP, SIP, etc.

Up-time is measured in terms of percentage and businesses should ideally target for five nines as their goal for up-time ie., 99.999% uptime which converts to 5.26 minutes of downtime per year or 25.9 seconds of downtime every month. Though 100% is the most desirable but 99.999% of uptime is considered great for most businesses and it really takes careful planning to achieve this feat.

Time to first Byte (TTBT)

With business getting extremely competitive online, and ever shrinking attention span of customers today, it is extremely important that your website loads as fast as possible. TTBT is the time taken for the first byte to arrive at the user’s web browser and hence, is a very strong indication of how fast a user perceives your website to be.
With at-least 40% of users leaving the website if the delay is 3 second or more, this is an important parameter that you must monitor to enhance the web-experience of your customers and hence your revenue along with the overall brand perception.

Full Page Load Monitoring:

The demand for speed is continuously increasing and knowing that your website is up, isn’t enough. Full page load time (FPLT) refers to the time taken by the website to load completely with all its elements such as videos, images, GIFs etc. This is extremely important to monitor because reducing the TTBT and Ping time is necessary but not sufficient as the user can interact with your offers and the website only when it has loaded completely.

Hence, your IT needs to know exactly which element on your website is taking how much time to load. Only then can they improve it to the desired standards. With the help of software like FYIPE, you will get load time information on each element, for each hour. A comprehensive report on all the resources will instantly identify the cause of failure if a page is not loading during the expected period of time.

Based on Full Page Load time report you can predict further behavior of your hardware and consequently will be able to plan your hardware upgrade without having an impact on your page performance.

Improving this parameter has some really productive consequences in long run. For example,

Reducing load time by 2.2 seconds alone helped Mozilla improve the conversions by 15.4%.
Walmart improved its conversions by 2% for every 1 sec of reduction in load time.
Just a 100ms delay lead to a loss of nearly 1% in Amazon revenues.

Improving FPLT not only improves your revenues and brand perception but also improves your Google search rankings which will lead to your website appearing higher on the first page and possibly attract most users searching for your product or service. It’s a win-win right ?

Broken Links

Though broken links some businesses more than others but as a general rule, “Broken links are bad for business. Period.” It affects your business in the following ways:

Your website ranking goes down as this is an important parameter used by Google to rank pages. A few broken links and all your efforts for SEO, reducing load times and all your marketing could go straight down the pool.
It reflects bad on your brand reputation and leaves customers unhappy with the experience which reflects bad on revenue as well.
It affects your revenue especially if the page where the sale is meant to happen goes down and shows a beautiful “404”.

Synthetic Transaction Monitoring

Functional verification is an important part of web page monitoring. If we consider an e-commerce website, a typical user performs functions like visit the web page, signup or login to their account, surf across the products over different pages, add product to the cart, and pay for the product online.

If any of the steps fails, the business will suffer not only the loss of money but the customer as well probably forever.

So how do businesses avoid such events?

The most logical solution is to test and perform the same actions exactly as is expected from the user and verify that it works successfully every time. However, this process is time consuming and extremely inefficient.

This process is completely automated by using synthetic transaction monitoring. It uses a predefined script to perform the same actions as the business users/customers.

The script imitates web transaction flow and checks the functionality of each step. You can choose loading time for each step or action and if time is higher than predefined, the monitor will generate an alert and notify you. In alert notifications, you will see all necessary information such as the cause of the alert, in which step the script has failed and the screenshot of the webpage at the moment of failure.

This ensures that the business is informed immediately if the webpage or one of the steps is not functioning as expected. Companies like FYIPE allows the businesses to run the script at regular intervals as per their requirements to keep control from all business-crucial locations.

API monitoring

APIs are critical to your business. Monitoring APIs continuously ensures that there are no sudden unexpected behaviors expressed by the system. This ensures that you get to know about an incident much before than your customers do and thus be able to fix it on time.

It still seems tedious. What should i do?

Step 1: Visit Fyipe.
Step 2: Request a demo and free consultation for what suits your business best here.
Step 3: Get a call from the experts at Fyipe who will take it forward.
Step 4: Rest assured now. Keeping your website up and running is no hassle anymore.

Fyipe monitors your website 24 x 7 so that you don’t lose sleep over it anymore and helps you achieve the goal of 99.99% of uptime without a hassle.