#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top:40%; left:60px; z-index:1; background-color:#F0F4F9} #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; width:55px; height:60px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { float:left; height:30px; width:100%; background-color:#F0F4F9} #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height:30px; width:85px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; }

A LinkedIn user recently posed the question: “What are the best practices for monitoring, collecting and analyzing traffic data for a large content site?” Ian White, lead engineer at Neustar, jumped into to tell readers why active monitoring is just as important as analytics. Website monitoring ensures your site is functioning properly anytime from anywhere.

Below we’ve outlined a few of his key points that will help you monitor your site so you can sleep well at night knowing your website is always up and running.

Monitor everything. You need to be alerted whenever a critical system process goes offline. This includes web servers, cache, servers, databases, etc. Understand that you may not know everything you should monitor until it breaks for the first time, but that only serves as lessons learned for additional metrics to monitor and make for a more failsafe website over time.

How you monitor matters. Whether the purpose of your website is to log in a user or add an item to a shopping cart, your customers depend on each click of the mouse to be fully functional. These interactions require monitoring that automates real browser interactions—like sending headers, setting cookies or executing JavaScript—and alerts you if something unexpected occurs. This provides a realistic view of the customer experience.

Monitor from multiple locations. To ensure your website is fully functional from every coordinate on the globe, you need to monitor your site from different geographic locations. There is no “magic number” for how many locations you should monitor from, but we recommend at least three. For example, if your company is based in the U.S., we suggest you monitor from two locations in the States and at least one in Europe or Asia.

Implement Real User Monitoring (RUM). In addition to monitoring your website uptime, you should also test the load times for your website visitors. Similar to Google Analytics, RUM involves placing a JavaScript beacon on your site. Every time a user visits your site, the beacon records the load time and you are alerted whenever this time goes above a specified threshold.

Establish tiered alerting. If a tree falls down in a forest, does it make a sound? The same thought process behind this popular riddle goes into a tiered alerting system. If the individual responsible for fixing a downtime issue doesn’t check his or her email at 3:00am regularly, with a simple email alert system he or she will not hear if/when your site goes offline. Services like PagerDuty ensure that alerts run up the chain of command with continual forms of alerts until someone responds via email, text message or phone call.

For more information on Ian’s response or to join in on the discussion, click here.

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top:40%; left:60px; z-index:1; background-color:#F0F4F9} #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; width:55px; height:60px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { float:left; height:30px; width:100%; background-color:#F0F4F9} #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height:30px; width:85px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; }

Thanks to Dave Thompson for sharing his experience with using BrowserMob to test the performance of a Flex app. To read the full article, check out it here.

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top:40%; left:60px; z-index:1; background-color:#F0F4F9} #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; width:55px; height:60px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { float:left; height:30px; width:100%; background-color:#F0F4F9} #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height:30px; width:85px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; }

It’s almost that time of year again. Holiday shoppers looking to stay at arm’s length from the seasonal mall madness will undoubtedly turn to the Internet to make their gift purchases. In fact, ShopperTrak predicts national retail sales will rise 3% during November and December this year as compared to the same time period last year.

In order to keep up with this expected spike in website traffic, there are a few steps ecommerce companies should take to ready their site. In order to help, we’ve rounded up the top eight load testing and website monitoring tips to help ecommerce sites stay on their “A-game” this holiday season.

1. Start load testing now. Procrastination can be a worrisome habit. Put off today what you can do tomorrow, and you may find your ecommerce site has crashed. According to IBM report, Act, Don’t React: A Proactive Business Continuity Solution Protects your Revenues and Reputation, the average revenue loss per hour of downtime is $1.01 million—a price tag your business cannot afford.

2. Set objectives. Look at industry trends and establish what is “acceptable performance” for your organization. Example Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) before load testing can include:

• 90% of pages should load in 4 seconds or less
• All business transactions should take less than 1 minute to complete
• Category search should take no more than 6 seconds to complete

3. Use real browsers. Thanks to cloud computing, it is now cost effective to load test and monitor a website using real browsers. Real browsers let you create more life-like site traffic, unlike virtual browsers that simply mimic a browser’s http request / response sequence. You’ll come away with a clearer view of your end user’s experience.

4. Test beyond the firewall. The most frequently visited parts of your site are the most important to test: applications supporting your home page, browsing, product selection, checkout and exit. Without external testing, you’re only getting half the picture.

5. Revisit frequency: Consider increasing your monitoring frequency to make sure nothing goes unnoticed. You need to be notified immediately if there is any change in your website’s behavior.

6. Collaborate. Advertising and special promotions will affect traffic to your website. Coordinate with your marketing department to ensure your website can handle traffic upticks caused by marketing campaigns.

7. Document. Establish a holiday preparation process and document all of your load testing and monitoring activities. That way you’ll have all the records you need to perform a post-mortem and improve for next year.

8. Choose the Solution that Works for Best You. When working with load testing providers, you typically have two choices: (a) on-demand services that let you run tests 24/7 or (b) full-service testing, which normally includes a dedicated engineer. If you have the resources and expertise on staff, and require greater flexibility for when you test, on-demand is a good choice (Tip: See if you can get started with a free trial.)  If you could use additional expertise with testing and analysis, including professional recommendations and reporting, then full-service load testing is the way to go.

Visit http://www.browsermob.com for more information about our on-demand load testing solutions or http://www.webmetrics.com for more information on our performance monitoring and full-service load testing solutions.

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top:40%; left:60px; z-index:1; background-color:#F0F4F9} #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; width:55px; height:60px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { float:left; height:30px; width:100%; background-color:#F0F4F9} #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height:30px; width:85px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; }

Looking for a way to keep up on website performance best practices, load testing tips and all things related to the success of your websites and applications? Then join us for our new BrowserMob office hours.

We’re pleased to announce that starting October 7, SMEs from our Engineering, Professional Services, Customer Service and Sales teams are at your service for one hour on the first Friday of every month. Feel free to pick their brains and ask anything that’s on your mind. They’re happy to share success stories and lessons learned from their work with other customers.

Find full details on the new monthly tradition below:

What: First Friday Feedback, the official BrowserMob office hours

When: 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. PST, The first Friday of every month, beginning October 7

Where: Via WebEx (details to come once you register below)

Who: A diverse team of experts from various BrowserMob teams

How: Register here.

If you’d like to shoot our SMEs a question or feedback ahead of time so that we can be sure to cover it on Friday, please send us an . We look forward to seeing you there!