Achieving Improved Customer Satisfaction with Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Web service availability and response time are important factors in determining website visitor’s satisfaction level. Website visitors must be able to easily browse through the Web site with minimum waiting time. If pages load slowly and critical functions are not working, it will frustrate visitors and create a deterioration in customer satisfaction level, and ultimately the loss of the customers.

External and Internal Web site monitoring cannot fully reveal the problems with critical applications workflow. To accomplish deeper understanding of customer experience with mission-critical e-business operations and web applications, there is a need for complete overview of web transactions and web application performance.

Application performance monitoring (APM) detects, diagnoses and reports on application’s performance issues to ensure the application’s performance meets or exceeds end-users’ and businesses’ expectations.

External monitoring of web pages ensure that those pages are available to customers; Internal monitoring provides deeper insight into the diagnostics; Application Performance Monitoring checks web application down to every transaction to ensure that the critical flow is up and running.

Web pages have different functions: login/logout, checkout, check or send email etc. APM agents simulate end users, imitating step by step their actions with the system. These tests repeat within certain intervals remotely monitoring the availability and performance of multi-step web transactions and the web applications to proactively locate and fix bottlenecks in web systems.

At Monitis these tests are called Transaction Monitoring (TM). Monitis TM service simplifies detection and resolution of web application problems and malfunction of web application components. When web service response time is slow, it causes customer complaints. From Monitis external checks the problem can be revealed. While TM will help to find which part and/or function of the web page causes the performance issue. It will check web pages upon error detection, drilling down to the cause of the problem. TM measures response time per transaction and reveals the cause of the delay for specific page load.
TM must be activated for critical work flows of a web application that affects customer satisfaction. Even if there are some bugs in a system, if the bug does not cause any problem in service response time or site’s functionality, it cannot be seen as a serious problem.

TM can also be used for monitoring critical applications locally on a server. Compared with Internal monitoring that reveals system resource CPU usage - transaction monitoring can help compare the resource usage per request in each transaction. By revealing how many concurrent incoming requests will max out system resource, TM helps to detect resource shortage and prevent system management problems before they cause costly breakdowns. TM increases the efficiency of mission-critical e-business operations and web applications; dramatically reduces the time to troubleshoot a failed web application.

Monitis TM provides performance and availability reports for every check with up to duration of each step within the transaction. Step duration thresholds are determined and if the total execution time exceeds the ceiling, the step is reported as failed as well as the transaction.

Transaction monitoring results are displayed on the Monitis dashboard. The chart shows the monitoring results per each check. By clicking on the failed test(s) users can drill down to the specific step that had an execution problem, and go even deeper into the elements that are being implemented within that step, to find out the real cause of the delay or failure of each test. The screenshots are available to check the issue.

The web application monitoring service starts immediately without costly IT investments and long implementation periods of client-side software. Clients only need to record a web flow as a script and then upload on the server. The test will start running on the regular intervals. The script development skills are very basic.

The application performance directly correlates to the satisfaction level of customers’ and end-users’ experience using the web service. Real-time TM monitoring helps to eliminate the risk of lost revenue resulting from web application downtime.