What Is Web Application Availability Monitoring?
It’s critical in today’s online world to deliver your users a high quality online experience at all times and from every conceivable location. 24/7 365 uptime is a goal, and while you may not always achieve it, you and your team absolutely need to know if and when your web application begins to experience performance issues or crashes outright.
This is where web application monitoring comes in. Any glitch in an online system can spell disaster for a brand and a business. Temporary loss of revenue is one thing but a business that fails online also runs the risk of losing valued customers. These losses can compound if issues are not promptly dealt with.
Any business running online applications must budget for web application availability monitoring. With such monitoring, we can confirm a website’s availability, its load times, general performance, and the continued utility of its functions.
There are a variety of tools available to us that can help us monitor web application availability. Let’s have a look.
Servers
Some monitoring tools help us check to see whether a web application server is available. This may include checking to see if the server’s databases are functioning correctly, if external servers are causing any problems, or if hosting servers are not functioning properly.
Monitoring APIs
When APIs (application programming interfaces) have issues, this can cause problems in communication between two different pieces of software. Several web application monitoring tools offer to check on the proper functioning of APIs. With API monitoring, a monitoring tool will ping the API to see what kind of response it gets, when it gets it, and whether there are any errors to be looked into.
It’s important for any business using third-party APIs to keep a check on their continued functioning and uptime. If a connection to an API stops working, this can cause numerous issues for users. Your website or application may not crash, but key components could stop working, causing frustrated users to bounce.
Performance Monitoring
Performance monitoring can help alleviate issues with the overall structure of your application. This can include things like errors with code, application dependency, and general customer experience. People expect websites and applications to load fast. We’re all busy. If a site takes ten seconds to load, are you likely to stick around?
Performance monitoring tools can examine the line-by-line efficiency of code. It can also help you pinpoint exactly where load times slow, so your developers can take action and resolve performance issues through code or improved infrastructure.
Types of Web Application Monitoring
End-User Experience Monitoring
This type of monitoring enables your business to access key information related to the user’s end-to-end experience of a particular web application. You can evaluate the ease of access and the general momentum or flow between different functions. The final goal, of course, is to enable the best user experience for your visitors.
This type of monitoring is more complex than traditional network monitoring tools that simply monitor uptime and various network functions. A few things that this type of monitoring can cover include JavaScript injection, real user monitoring, device-based EUEM, API monitoring and more.
JavaScript injection is a test of what the user experiences when they access the application. Real user monitoring collects backend data of what functions inside the network affect which specific aspect of the user experience of the application. Device-based EUEM generally keeps an eye on how the application affects user-device health, and how well it performs on their specific device.
Runtime Application Architecture Discovery
This type of monitoring helps visualize the code and other infrastructure involved in your website or application. With this monitoring, you can see when and how the infrastructure falters. Real-time visibility of your infrastructure allows you to monitor the effect of changes as you write the code.
This type of tool helps discover some of the relationships that underlie the architecture of your web application, in turn allowing you to configure it so that it performs at the best level possible.
User-Defined Transaction Profiling
It can be helpful to see what kind of back-end processes are involved each time a user logs in to your web application. User-defined translation profiling allows you to see these processes so they can be assessed and adjusted.
The profiling mechanism creates a business transaction each time a user loads the application. The transaction captures a snapshot of the various elements involved in generating a user-experience. For instance, it may capture the databases involved and the servers used.
On the user’s end, a simple transaction such as a buying of a piece of software may involve a plethora of actions under the application’s domain. Elements such as a user’s logon credentials, what they’re buying, checks with financial institutions if the transaction is possible all work on the back-end part of the software and should be monitored just as vigorously as a website’s homepage.
Component Deep-Dive Monitoring
If individual components of the application’s infrastructure are measured, it can help to define action steps needed to solve complex problems in the code. Think of this like seeing the entire infrastructure as different pieces of the same puzzle. When you use a monitoring tool to zoom into individual puzzle pieces, it can help see exactly where the issue lies and what needs to be done to fix it with precision.
Analytics
Analytics give you raw data to interpret. A well-designed monitoring tool like thise at Dotcom-Monitor and the like will allow you to see what results would be generated if an application is running at its baseline. The tool will also form correlations between sets of data so that it’s easier to see relationships between different functions, and it will also give a set of actions needed to pull the application to optimum levels.
The Benefits of Web Application Availability Monitoring
Web application availability monitoring is like turning your home into “smart” home. It ensures your digital house continues to function properly for its visitors, and if something goes wrong, it alerts you so you can take quick action and gain insights to solve the issue so it doesn’t occur again.
Web Application Availability monitoring will help you reduce downtime, improve performance, and rest easy knowing your site is monitored at all hours every day. You can set alerts to notify team members via email and SMS, so in case of downtime or serious performance degradation, immediate action can be taken.
How to Choose a Web Application Availability Monitoring Tool
How you choose a web application availability monitoring tool depends on your business needs. There are a variety of options available in the market and it’s essential to do some research and establish your requirements before you make a decision on which tool to invest in.
Complexity
Knowing what audience your business caters to, how large the average userbase is, the services being offered, and what your web application is built to handle will determine what kind of web application availability monitoring tools you’ll need. More complex software generates more complex results, and requires advanced monitoring solutions.
Monitoring from Around the World
No website really exists to be accessed from a single location. It’s important to consider where your website is accessed most frequently and to create monitoring that reflects the reality of your users in terms of location. Web application monitoring tools will help you set region-specific monitors, and you can use a tool like Google Analytics to best understand where your traffic comes from and which geographical regions could be better served.
End-User Experience
Whether you’re a small business owner with a relatively smaller development team, or an enterprise with major web application availability monitoring requirements, you’ll want to source tool that’s in your budget with industry-leading support like Dotcom-Monitor.
Not all monitoring platforms are created equal, and you want to stretch your budget to get maximum value. Working with a company like Dotcom-Monitor will help you learn what you don’t know you need and save you time and headaches on your way to giving your end-users the best experience in terms of uptime and performance.
In today’s online world, users expect websites and web applications to load quickly, perform at all times, and be available 24/7 from pretty much any location. Web application availability monitoring is a necessary part of any serious business’ digital strategy, as without it you won’t know a web application is down until somebody reports it, which can be disastrous for your reputation and seriously impact your bottom line.
Monitoring gives you the peace of mind you need and the resources to keep you and your team informed around the clock should your application experience issues. You may not always be able to prevent your web application from crashing, but with monitoring you can react quickly, build in contingencies, and rest assured you’re taking the proper steps to ensure all of your users have the best possible experience with your web applications.
Dotcom-Monitor for Web Application Availability Monitoring
Dotcom-Monitor offers “complete end-to-end application performance monitoring solutions to track everything from front-end applications and web pages to infrastructure and server metrics. Uncover performance blind spots and maintain service level agreements to provide a best-in-class digital user experience.”
You can schedule a one-on-one demo with a Dotcom-Monitor expert who will help you audit your systems and understand what web application availability monitoring can mean for your business.
