Network and Systems Monitoring

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Landing Page Load Time – Important Factor for Google Quality Score

Google AdWords blog states Google’s intention to incorporate landing page load time in their Quality Score. Companies advertising on Google's AdWords system have to prove best experience for their users. The slow loading pages will receive higher minimum bids and lower Quality Scores, and visa versa. This means that the advertisers have to pay more if their records show slow page load.

Load time is important for providing quality service to users. If you have fast loading time the you won't easily be abandoned. Load time is amount of time required for the page to load, when vistors click on the link or ad. While working on optimizing page load times, tools are required to monitor and measure. Monitis suggests very cost effective http monitoring which starts immediately after entering page URL into Monitis External Monitoring module. The real time report appears within 5 minutes showing load time from different geographic locations.

Users set threshold and monitoring, and receive alerts when load time is slower than the acceptable level. Content matching will show if the important keywords spread out on your page are available and load quickly.

Google will evaluate Quality Scores on monthly basis. Independent external monitoring will help to improve and optimize pages proactively and increase Google Quality Score.

External Web Monitoring for eHealth Applications

The Internet provides big contributions in health care. More and more applications move online. Web-based applications are less expensive and started to compete with traditional healthcare IT applications. The Single Web browser interface allows views or the ability to exchange information, and can also migrate to mobile/wireless platforms. Healthcare-related applications become complex. There are web sites that provide information (content) to consumers and physicians. Recent developments in Health 2.0 focus on communication, information sharing and community.

Using the internet for healthcare purposes increases end-user dependency and the need for external monitoring to keep 24/7 availability and high performance of the web-based healthcare applications.

Let's discuss a case how Monitis External and Internal Monitoring can be used to keep the healthcare applications available and improve customer satisfaction.

HealthCenter Maintains High Level of Care Giving

A HealthCenter Hospital upgraded its medical practice management and EMR system. Now they use web-based solutions for the internal care path management; care processes starting from patients' admission to release for inpatient and outpatient practices. All lab tests and referrals are managed through the same web interface. Also they started to provide service online to their patients and have a system which connects with other databases and family doctors’ applications.

It was now important to keep the application flawlessly running. Any downtime would jeopardize care giving process. HealthCenter was using monitoring products but mostly to monitor low level systems performance. They signup to Monitis service as an additional monitoring.

First, they activated simple ping and http tests from External Monitoring to monitor availabilty of web pages from external perspectives to verify connectivity. They started to receive real-time monitoring data on uptime and page load speed of their eHealth application from end user perspective. It was also important to undertstand how their application was performing for their users from multiple locations. This data provided them with better perspectives on performance and availability of the site from other geographic locations. Monitoring web applications from multiple physical locations showed if a problem is localized to specific networks or whether it affects all users.


The internet extends to multiple countries, networks and vendors. It is important to distinguish real outages from short accidents on the network. With Monitis they were able to compare monitoring results from other locations by running checks within short time intervals.

External monitoring revealed that the Health Center Hospital's web application was slow or even "timed-out" at certain times of the day. So hospital management wanted to know the real cause of the problem. They activated Monitis Internal Monitoring and understood that the problem comes from one the processes on the server, which consumes server CPU and slows application response time.
The Health Center's web applications was complex, and simple connectivity couldn't cover fully end-user experience to understand full page load and availability of the critical content. They activated the Content Matching feature to monitor full-page vs. html download. This way they allowed monitoring solutions to test and analyze content for errors and check for timeouts. The login fields availability was monitored by the POST function.

But the web page contained other elements, and dynamic processes, such as images, functional buttons and critical workflows, the operations of which would highly affect end user experience. Monitis had a solution to that problem as well. HealthCenter activated Transaction Monitoring features and started to check web application down to every page component and every transaction to ensure that the critical flow is up and running. TM simulated end users' actions with the system. Within certain intervals it was checking the response time and performance of each page and its components, as well as each transaction and provided summary on the whole transaction or information on each individual process. In case of failure, the TM detailed view showed which component or which transaction had failed to open. Monitis TM provided a snapshot of the page that failed to initiate. This monitoring allowed HealthCenter management to receive real information on user experience and within a timely manner prevent problems before they cause serious outages, and customer complaints.

Internet business consists of more then just a Web server. HealthCenter activated mail servers, FTP servers, VPN, networks and systmes monitoring. Comparing Internal and External monitoring provides the HealthCenter management the ability to analyze and quickly and accurately determine the source of the problem. Escalated alerts and notifications to their emails, IM or phones allowed them to be aware of their web application performance anywhere and any time.

HealthCenter can now check not only infrastructure and computers, but complete coverage to full e-business infrastructure performance and functionality and can notice system deficiencies in advance and keep high level of care giving.

Monitis.External Website Monitoring

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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.

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.

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.