Web Application Monitoring: What Is It Good For?
Web application monitoring is accomplished with tools, methods, and practices that determine how well a web application functions. In basic terms, web application monitoring helps you determine how long it takes for an application to load and what kind of experience your users are having at scale.
These tools will help you determine a variety of factors including CPU usage, time taken to load to the first byte, database optimization, broken links, and more. In this article, we look at some of the how and why of web application performance monitoring.
The Importance of Web Application Performance Monitoring
Regular web application monitoring allows you to understand the working mechanisms of your application and gives you insights into any faults within your application and if it’s performing at optimum levels. Monitoring allows you to know what faults persist over time and what actions you and your development team can take in order for the application to be ready for any unusual spikes in use.
A number of easy development moves can improve your web application’s performance. Simple adjustments such as loading a heavy image as the user scrolls and utilizing animations during loads can improve your users’ experience and lead to more engagement with your application. A high performing application isn’t a “nice-to-have” but an essential part of any application development process. Web app users have literally millions of options at their fingertips – other apps, websites, social media, games, and more – all pulling their attention. If your app is slow and doesn’t work quickly, 24/7, without fail, you’ll likely lose engagement and users outright. So web application performance needs to be top of mind at every stage of your development process, from conception through to launch and ongoing updates.
Let’s take a deeper look at how to monitor web application performance.
Time to Load & Mobile Devices
It’s essential to take a mobile-first approach to your understanding of your web application’s UX and performance. Per tek-tools.com, the average web page loading time is around 87% higher on mobile as compared to desktop.
If your web application only loads quickly for users with the highest bandwidth and fastest devices, you’re doing a disservice to users who engage your application on mobile and less current devices. Proper performance monitoring allows you to set benchmarks and drive your application’s development process to best serve all your users.
Crucial Factors for Web Application Performance
The following factors will give you an idea into how application performance can help you monitor your online applications in order to gain actionable insights for current and future development of your application.
The Server
Each time a user takes an action on your web application, the application pings the server so it can then pull the information needed for the user. Processing time for the server depends on how well it’s functioning. If your server’s CPU, RAM, or disk space are affected in critical ways during normal use or surges, this is a sign that you need to allocate more resources to avoid performance degradation or a crash.
Location
A server’s location plays a role in how long it takes for a page to load. For instance, if your server is located in Florida, and you have a user in Singapore, the page will of course load faster for the user from Florida.
You can address this issue with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that caches your site globally for quick access from various locations, making your web application more easily accessible for people around the world.
Size
As the Internet has matured, so has the demand for high-quality multimedia such as video and audio. This naturally makes the content on web applications a little heavier than simple text and images. Servers take longer to load larger files.
The simplest way to avoid a lagging web application is to compress the images or videos present there. You might also consider streaming videos and larger audio files from a third party provider instead of hosting them directly on your own server.
Challenges in Developing a Web Application for Performance
Complex Architecture
An important element of any web application is its ability to execute a program and find solutions when faced with any difficulties. The problem is, that since web applications now use and analyze data to troubleshoot from a wide variety of sources, it’s become difficult for traditional web application monitoring tools to keep up. These tools simply aren’t equipped to deal with the massive amounts of data filtered through in today’s web applications.
Lack of Foresight & Objectivity
Most development teams follow a reactive approach to solving tech issues. This is understandable – people are busy, and there’s typically always another project to look forward to rather than circling back to audit past work. Nevertheless, a superior approach is to get ahead of potential issues with performance monitoring, which allows you to forecast potential problems and even identify critical issues before they cause serious performance degradation or even downtime.
As the saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know. Enlisting the assistance of a professional load testing service or consultant will help to bring objectivity to your performance monitoring and give your development team and added shot in the arm to emphasize performance at every stage of development. A professional will be able to analyze your web application wish fresh eyes and give insights you’ll almost certainly miss working only with your internal team.
Five Web Application Performance Best Practices
Here’s a list of five best practices to focus on during your web application performance workflow.
Uptime
One easy way to make sure that the application is available at all times is to ping the server at regular intervals to see if it responds or not. Pinging can also be used to monitor response times that can signify major issues with the web application if it begins to become slow or unresponsive.
Uptime is essential for every business with a website, especially those for whom the site directly drives revenue, such as eCommerce.
Errors
A fundamental knowledge of HTTP error codes is helpful here. The first number in the code being displayed generally signifies the type of issue being faced. For instance, the code HTTP Error 500 generally indicates a problem with the inner workings of the server, which means it’s not necessarily connected with code. Your development team can take prompt and appropriate steps based on the type of error thrown.
Key Transactions
Depending on your business needs, you may want to identify what some key transactions are and what role they play in the workings of the web application. This varies across different businesses. A ticketing web application has different needs than a banking web application. These applications will have different criteria for performance as well. You’ll want to work with your team to determine what these criteria are for your business.
Dependency Monitoring
Unforeseen issues can arise between development, testing, and production environments for web applications. Web application monitoring tools will help your development team directly trace unexpected events that happen within a program to help to identify where exactly a given issue lies, so prompt action can be taken.
The RED Method
Web application monitoring tools offer a variety of metrics. You can cut through some of the noise with the RED method, an acronym which stands for:
- Rate
- Errors
- Duration
The rate function of this method will determine how many requests are processed by the server per second. The error function determines the number of requests that run into errors. The duration is just the duration taken for the requests to be processed.
This method services to give you a preliminary overview of how your web application performs on a usual basis. If further investigation seems necessary because your web application isn’t functioning optimally, then more metrics need to be added to see what can be accomplished.
Web Application Performance Testing Is Essential
Regular, recurring, and professional web application performance testing will help you and your development team deliver the highest quality experience to your customers, ensure uptime, and rest easy knowing you’ve taken appropriate actions to strengthen your most important digital assets.
Today’s consumers expect a quality digital experience and journey regardless of their device or location. Whether you’re a SaaS organization, an eCommerce company, or simply use your website to generate leads, it’s essential to adopt a web application performance mentality and keep performance top of mind throughout your development process.
We strongly encourage you to build performance discussions into every phase of your development and feedback cycle. While this might seem like a chore, over time this mindset will come naturally as you and your team begin to understand the utmost importance performance plays in your business’ success and targets. Nobody thinks highly of a brand that can’t keep a website or online application performing well. The time you take up front to emphasize performance now for your organization will pay dividends in the long term through satisfied users and an exceptional website or application.
