Tuesday, January 29, 2008

How internal network monitoring contributes to better customer experience?

Website monitoring prevents you from losing web customers and helps increase website return on investment. We have examined Website External Monitoring in our previous post. External Monitoring looks at your website from outside your organization’s firewall and measures customer experience and alerts you if problems occur.

To accomplish a deeper understanding of the real cause of the problem, businesses need to compare outside the firewall monitoring results with the findings from monitoring agents located inside the firewall. This service is called Website Internal Monitoring.

Internal monitoring is used for checking websites, servers and network services that are not accessible outside of an organization’s firewall. This technique extends website monitoring reach, and provides deeper perspective into key systems performance indicators to find bottlenecks, diagnose problems and reduce cost to increase efficiency of IT operations. All these will ultimately affect your web customer experience.

For example, by process monitoring you can find out your server CPU and website response time correlations. Maybe you had received an alert from an external monitor that your website is slow or down. Your server response time was low or it hasn’t responded for some reason. Unless you have a chance to measure from different internal angles you won’t be able to compare and find out the problem. For example, it could have been that one of your key processes on your server had consumed your machine memory causing the downtime.

Monitis internal monitoring allows around the clock testing of your servers and devices for resource utilization. By monitoring key processes on your servers you will be able to determine CPU and memory consumption by each process. This will reveal obvious problems long before the processor or memory could be permanently damaged.

Process monitoring is important, since some processes can consume too much memory. This can cause inefficient operations of your web servers and databases and ultimately affect your customer experience with your site.

Monitis http and ping tests allow monitoring critical applications from your client location to ensure mutual connectivity for better business and customer satisfaction.
If you are concerned about your target market experience with your website you can install multiple agents on different servers and geographic location and monitor the same resource and detect problems.

With Monitis internal monitoring agent you can also monitor your intranet applications: such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Document management systems for uptime and performance to ensure system the best operations of your IT infrastructure.

Monitis internal agent supports different platforms: Windows, Linux and Sun.

Internal website monitoring is activated using smart agents which are easily deployed on any internal or even external computer that stores critical data and applications.

If you have IT people on your staff, you can assign this task to that person, but by using web interface of Monitis service, you can also watch and control your website monitoring picture.

You can conveniently manage your internal and external monitoring through a single interface Monitis Dashboard. Multiple reports and charts on one screen make it easy to compare and understand the real cause of lost connections or performance problems so you can increase your customer satisfaction.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Using Monitis for External Monitoring of Your Websites

When you’re running a dynamic site, your online business cannot afford downtime. If your website is down your visitors and customers will go elsewhere. You need to know as soon as possible if your site is not available to your customer. You should be able to detect when something goes wrong before a failure occurred.

To provide exceptional customer satisfaction, you need to be aware of of your customers experience when they try to access your website. To accomplish this you will need to subscribe to an external website monitoring site.

External website monitoring service watches over your website and fully examines your customer experience with your website. It checks whether your site is available to your visitors and whether it is performing properly.

You can use Monitis, Web Server Performance, Availability, Traffic Monitoring and Analytics service, that offers different options for testing your customer experience from outside the firewall. The screenshot below shows Monitis external monitoring dashboard.

Monitis external monitoring agent periodically checks your web page and evaluates your customers. It retrieves real time reports about your website behavior, and alerts you if something fails in meeting the proper performance requirements.

Monitis presently monitors websites from four geographic locations: The UK, the USA, Panama and Germany. Reports on the Monitis dashboard show Response time in Milliseconds, Status and Location. Usually when the page load time reaches 2 seconds it requires little attention. If it is 4 seconds then it is considered slow. If the load speed is over 4 seconds and gets to 8-10 seconds, the site is considered critical.

Using Monitis external monitoring agent site owners can monitor all standard protocols for Web sites and web applications: website (http, https), VoIP (SIP protocol), Email server, Network/Device (TCP, UDP, FTP or PING), DNS and/or MySQL.

Monitoring every section is important for ensuring non-stop operations of your website, and these services will enable you to understand which part of the whole cycle caused the problem and malfunctioning of your website.

Monitis also monitors websites for specific phrases, such as checking important keywords, strings and functional parts of the website and signup or other forms. Activating GET command will allow the monitor to grab an entire page and look for key information. This part of the external monitoring is called content matching. POST command monitors functional forms of your website to ensure that they work properly.

Alerts and notifications are sent to contacts set by the customers: email, instant messengers and SMS (text messages to cell phones) according to notification rules, defined dynamically from the external monitoring module, and can be managed from Notifications module. Monitis will also report problems via RSS feeds.

Monitoring results are displayed on the dashboard (see below) easy to customize using drag and drop functionality and changing views to Line, Bar, Table views and Scatter chart. External monitoring reports are generated from the External Monitoring module for previous and current months. Weekly reports are emailed to all customers.


 
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