Monitoring Web Services

How do you measure user experience?

Web services such as web shops and websites consist of numerous parts that make out the user experience. If a problem occurs in one of the components the customer might not be able to continue the order process, use the web application or read the information on your web page. As a result you as a service provider risk to lose goodwill, leads and even revenue. The worst part is that you might not even be aware of the problems! If your site is up, but with bad performance, slow load times, crashing scripts or a failing 3rd party service, will you be made aware of the problems?

With op5 Monitor you can continually monitor your processes and receive alerts when any of the services components is not performing as expected. op5 Monitor automatically simulate an action or path that a customer or end-user would take on your site or web based service (for example SaaS). The path are then continuously monitored at specified intervals for availability and response time measures. The data can be presented in professional and informative reports, invaluable for making well informed decisions, change management and resource planning and allocation.

Monitoring web services with op5 Monitor

In order to reduce downtime it is imperative to have the complete picture of the IT environment. This enables you to fast identify the root cause of a problem when or even before a service or application is malfunctioning.

op5 Monitor uses parallel monitoring to assure performance and functionality on your web services similar to setting up application monitoring. We recommend you to check and measure the overall performance from all four levels to assure quality and up-time for the applications.

Check that the underlying hardware/infrastructure is in normal operational status.
Check that the included processes in the applications are functioning normally.
Run specific checks on the functional status of the different applications.
Run generic process checks that will show you the overall performance of a complete service (function).

1. Hardware/infrastructure checks

A slow fan, an almost full disk, a broken RAM, a congested LAN or WAN connection can impair a applications’ performance and function.

2. Included processes

Check that included process are operational and running from both the system and user perspectives.

3. Application Checks

op5 Monitor has a rich set of specific application checks for different purposes. In general they all have a common purpose of: initiating an action or query > check the response > measure the overall transaction time.

4. End to end service checks

As a complementary way to assure full quality we can also create complete scripts for a fixed process of multiple steps. As an example: testing an web shop order process, op5 Monitor can:

Monitoring of a order process from the end user perspective

This test is scheduled to be executed every X minutes and will tell you that the application is working according to your defined levels and from the end users perspective.

Proactive web management

op5 Monitor enables a web master to identify problems and determine if the website or web application is slow or experiencing downtime before that problem affects actual end-users. This type of monitoring enables proactive web management and is useful for companies to monitor its web services 24×7.

SLA Monitoring

op5 Monitor makes it easy to achieve SLA Monitoring (Service level agreement). It’s easy to install and is often used to measure the service deliveries from 3rd party service providers. The solution benefits all parties in the service delivery process . You as the customer can make sure you have all the facts so that you never need to go in ”blind” to the monthly meeting with your partner again, being able to efficiently negotiate your terms for the service level agreement. Assure that you get what you pay for and benchmark your service quality both internally and externally.