Web Application Monitoring Tools – An Overview
Web application monitoring assesses the functionality, performance and user experience of your application by providing an overview of the components involved and alerting you if there are performance issues and downtime. Effective web application monitoring allows you to optimize your web application’s performance and provide excellent customer experiences.
“There’s plenty of evidence to show that faster page loads increase the number of pages viewed on a site and, more importantly, boost sales. One recent study described on the Tagman blog using an online eyeglass site showed substantial correlation between speed and sales. In fact, a mere one-second delay in page load time was accompanied by a 7% decline in sales.”
– Forbes.com
When a web application isn’t monitored, it might delay responses, face downtime, be vulnerable to attacks, or all of the above. All these factors will adversely affect your business. Potential clients that hold business opportunities will drift away if the experience they get on your web application doesn’t come up to par.
Web application monitoring lends a critical hand to your business, one that can’t be overlooked. Because of its multidimensional support system, it activates dormant parts of your web application, and eliminates ill-performing elements to give you the outlook you need for success.
What Is a Web Application Monitoring Tool?
Web application monitoring checks your web application for errors, bugs, and heavy resource utilization to give you support in your endeavors to enable the best user experience possible. You attain a criteria by which you can decipher which components of the web application to eliminate, and which to keep.
The process is simple. The software runs through different functions of your web application, assesses its performance, sees what happens at the back-end, gives error reports, and finalizes the process through detailed reports.
There are several indicators or touchpoints a web application monitoring tool will measure:
- Uptime, or the amount of time your web application is up and running.
- Database performance
- The amount of stress on your CPU
- Links that won’t open, pages that won’t load, images that won’t surface etc.
Using a web application monitoring tool will keep all of the functions mentioned above in check. They can improve your web application’s performance, maintain a decent uptime percentage, and optimize its processes.
Benefits
Web application monitoring optimizes application functions so they can perform at their best possible level. Once you’ve monitored your application and seen the results, you can then create a plan for improvements.
Listed below are some of the benefits of web application monitoring tools to your business.
Error detection
Errors will generate a bad response from the users of your web application because the performance and security is compromised. The sooner such issues are fixed, and preventive measures are put in place, the better.
“Over 60% of failures result in at least $100,000 in total losses, up substantially from 39% in 2019. The share of outages that cost upwards of $1 million increased from 11% to 15% over that same period.”
-Businesswire.com
Web application monitoring tools will help you detect these errors early in the process. The tools will generate an error message as soon as your web application runs into a problem. These error messages can then be analyzed, and the necessary steps to take to avoid future issues in the same domain can be regulated.
Downtime Notifications
Natural disasters, faulty wiring, or power outages can affect your web application. Faulty wiring, in our case, would be faulty code. Whatever the cause, any time your application goes down, there’s a chance it might have your business’s outlook in jeopardy. People want access all the time, and they want it fast. If any of these causes affect your web application, it may affect user experience and in turn cause tremendous losses.
“One in five organizations report experiencing a ‘serious’ or ‘severe’ outage (involving significant financial losses, reputational damage, compliance breaches and in some severe cases, loss of life) in the past three years, marking a slight upward trend in the prevalence of major outages. According to Uptime’s 2022 Data Center Resiliency Survey, 80% of data center managers and operators have experienced some type of outage in the past three years – a marginal increase over the norm, which has fluctuated between 70% and 80%”
– Businesswire.com
A web application monitoring tool comes in handy here. It alerts you every time there’s a potential threat to your system’s uptime. Your system’s uptime is important because you don’t want to lose potential customers because your website is down.
Security Enhancement
There are thieves in the data world, too, trying to gain access to sensitive user information stored in your vaults. Any weak code or ill-functioning pathways may give cyberattackers a free hold on your web application. This not only hurts your business’ reputation, but also gives compliance authorities reason to place holds and penalties on your web application.
Performance optimization
Diminishing marginal returns–it’s an economic concept–says that more labor isn’t better because at a certain point, the graph is meant to flatten. The same goes for your web application–over time, its functions depreciate, performance deteriorates, and applicability reduces in strength. CPU usage increases, memory decreases, and more and more bandwidth is made use of, thereby making your application lag and run slower.
Having web application monitoring in place helps optimize some of the functions so you don’t have to worry about your application not producing as much profit as you would desire it to.
Criteria to Choose a Web Application Monitoring Solution
There are certain criteria you should be on the lookout for when considering web application monitoring tools as well. This may be crucial to your satisfaction with them.
Ease of Use
Training takes time, and just like anything else, resources as well. Web application monitoring tools should require the least bit of training for you and your teammates so you can be up and running in no time.
Compatibility With Other Software
Your web application monitoring tool should be compatible with your web browsers, systems, and the language you used to create the web application. A web application monitoring tool that doesn’t combine well with other softwares you might have doesn’t produce results that would be meaningful to you.
Reportage
Ideally, you’d want to read your reports without the help of other, more complicated software. Therefore, it’s impeccable to analyze and see which of the competitors in the market offer easy readability into their results.
Alerts
A good web application monitoring tool will have certain alerting capabilities that become essential as you monitor your web application through time. You want to respond to malfunctions in the most efficient way possible, and a monitoring tool that can alert you instantly will play a big role in that.
Our Top Pick: Dotcom-Monitor
It’s a bit of a challenge to monitor transactions when there is more than one step involved. Dotcom-Monitor helps to monitor just those, checking for functional workability and performance from more than one touchstone and also from within the network.
Dotcom-Monitor’s EveryStep Recorder helps you generate scripts that you wouldn’t need to use any code languages for. By recording the transactions that happen between your user and your web application, you can generate test scripts that depict real user behavior. This simplifies the process so you don’t have to spend time learning and writing code. You can spend the energy in other domains like fixing errors and revamping your web application’s user interface, which will bring far more profit to your business.
You have the ability to test from a wide variety of geographical locations. Meaning, your tests no longer have to be localized. With this ability, you can assess what functions work well in one particular area. So, for instance, if your web application doesn’t work well in some regions of Asia, you’ll know exactly how to counteract those performance issues.
Dotcom-Monitor Vs. Pingdom
With alerts falling through every device possible, it may be hard to focus on other more important tasks if you employ Pingdom for your business. While alerting across domains has its benefits, it will take away from other tasks that can help improve your web application.
You want a web application monitoring tool that is well-balanced throughout. Dotcom-Monitor’s alerting program depends on its ability to detect errors as they arise. You don’t need several error messages across several devices all at the same time. You’ll waste your mental energy in looking at each of those.
Consider Dotcom-Monitor’s Web Application Monitoring Tool
Dotcom-Monitor provdes a variety of features that overpower other competitors in the market. You can book a demo or sign up for a free trial here.
