In the digital era, most enterprises use a web platform to reach potential customers and showcase the products or solutions they offer. Websites have become extremely popular as a medium of establishing a brand image, and they contribute in making a major share of revenue. Well-planned websites can capture the attention of the target audience, increasing the probability of them turning into valuable, paying customers.
Whether you deliver a smooth user experience for your clients and prospective customers or not depends on the performance of your website. If your website is unavailable or has poor responsiveness, end users won’t be able to engage with your website’s pages or won’t want to wait for them to load, which can have a significant impact on your business’s reputation.
Therefore, to ensure the effectiveness of your site and avoid any performance hiccups, website performance monitoring is pivotal. Not only does it provide insight into your website’s availability, but also gives you an understanding of critical metrics of your website, so that you can work on improving its reliability and making it work optimally.
What is website monitoring?
Website monitoring involves constantly tracking the availability and performance of your website. It helps verify if the website is behaving as expected for end users and notifies you if any issues arise in your website’s performance. Fixing these issues can save you from unnecessary performance setbacks. ManageEngine Applications Manager provides extensive website monitoring that allows you to track and monitor your website from various perspectives.
Applications Manager offers four different ways to track your website performance depending on your requirements. Let’s take a look at these options and the key website performance metrics that you can track with Applications Manager.
Website availability monitoring
Website downtime is a major cause of concern for businesses. Frequent downtimes can make your site lose credibility among loyal customers as well as create a bad first impression on first time visitors.
Downtime in a website can occur for a number of different reasons such as scheduled maintenance, data center problems, bugs in website code, and hacking attempts. Although website downtime is sometimes inevitable, enterprises still strive to lower downtimes as much as possible, and website monitoring solutions can help by notifying you when your website is unavailable.
With Applications Manager’s website monitoring software, you can easily monitor your website’s availability by configuring a URL monitor to get instant notifications whenever your website goes down. You can even recheck the website’s status to identify and eliminate false positives.
Applications Manager lets website owners isolate factors contributing to poor website performance, helping them to fix these issues and streamline their site further.
Monitor website response time
Everybody loves a fast website. With improvements in broadband speeds and the advent of super fast websites, user expectations about website speed have changed. Recent studies indicate that the probability of users leaving your site increases 90 percent if your website takes longer than five seconds to load.
Response time of a website determines the speed of the website. Response time is how long it takes for your web server to connect and send data packets to the browser of an end user. A website without latency can leave a good impression on customers and can help lower bounce rates, too.
Applications Manager’s website monitoring service tracks your website’s response time along with split-ups such as DNS time, connection time, First Byte Time (FBT), and Last Byte Time. FBT is the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of response from a web server, meaning it’s a very strong indication of how fast the website is performing for that user.
Applications Manager also offers URL sequence monitoring, which can come in handy if you want to monitor a web application with several web pages. This is particularly useful to test multi-page e-commerce transactions to verify if they are functioning correctly and have a good response time. The URL sequence monitor performs end-to-end verification of transactions, helping you identify which step is slowing down the transaction.
Monitor websites from an end-user perspective
In today’s age of instant gratification, end users expect to be able to enjoy a seamless, issue-free experience on your website. Although monitoring the website availability and response time gives you a fair idea of whether your website is up and running or not, you can’t know if your users are able to perform transactions without fail unless you understand the website’s end-user experience.
This is where you need to use synthetic monitoring techniques. Synthetic transaction monitoring involves analyzing website performance from an end-user perspective, which can help you identify issues that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Applications Manager’s synthetic transaction monitoring feature (also known as the Real Browser Monitor) opens up an actual browser like Firefox from multiple geographical locations, and tracks how the elements in your website load from that location and, more specifically, the way your users view them.
You can dynamically track website availability and performance of your website from your user’s location. You can also record complex workflows using the recorder to keep an eye on important transactions taking place on your website.
With the Real Browser Monitor, you can analyze the response time of the various elements in your website such as scripts, CSS, images, third-party services, etc., and identify and isolate the ones that are causing the web page to load slowly. You can even make sure your website is meeting your business objectives and service level agreements (SLAs).
Because synthetic monitoring is based on simulated traffic, it’s useful for testing different combinations of website paths that end users may take. Synthetic monitoring helps with catching issues before end users run into them. It also enables development teams to check an application’s performance before rolling out upgrades or patches to users in a new location.
Website content monitoring
Monitoring the content of your website is another important aspect of website monitoring. Sometimes hackers can attack your website and deface the content without your knowledge. This can cause serious damage to your business’ reputation in the long run.
You can configure Applications Manager to monitor changes to your website content and alert you when content changes. Applications Manager provides various website monitoring metrics, such as details about the defaced elements along with the percentage of defacement.
This feature can be useful in quickly detecting security attacks that deface your website. It can also help with tracking missing or broken page elements or unplanned code changes.
Start monitoring your websites now
As a website administrator, there’s nothing worse than your website going down or not performing as expected and not being the first to know. Use ManageEngine Applications Manager’s website monitoring tool to monitor your critical websites and know right away when websites go down.
Applications Manager offers features for all the monitoring approaches mentioned above to make sure your websites are performing optimally. You can also use Applications Manager to monitor your internal servers, application servers, database servers, web servers, and other infrastructure elements as well as REST APIs. To get started, download a free, 30-day trial now!
