CASE
STUDY: How Website Monitoring Saved an Online Auto Parts Retailer
PROBLEM: Customers complaining about site
outages and slow site response times. Hosting company claiming that
the problems had been resolved. Customers remaining dissatisfied.
METHODOLOGY: External website monitoring
on a page-by-page basis at one-minute intervals pinpointed the problems.
SOLUTIONS: Realigning shared hosting,
fixing database indexing, DNS server upgrade, altering the web host's
BGP configuration and regular website monitoring.
THE STORY: Once seen as an alternative
marketing channel, online shopping has carved its own niche in the
marketplace. The online shopping sector has grown rapidly, outstripping
other sectors and opening new business prospects. The factors contributing
to the continuous growth of online shopping include wider product
ranges, convenience, lower prices, and availability of clear product
information. Recent large investments in e-commerce by companies
large and small have further energized the sector and strengthened
its roots.
This growth has not come easy. Although most shopping
sites feel that they have rid themselves of persistent growing pains,
some remain. A recent Andersen
Consulting Services survey reveals that more than 25 percent
of online shopping experiences fail during holiday seasons due to
site outages. Another
survey by the NDP Group reveals that up to 23 percent of online
shoppers still experience temporary website outages, late shipments,
and customer service issues.
Dotcom-Monitor
website and network monitoring specializes in ensuring performance
and uptime in online transaction processes, including shopping carts,
sign-ins, and form submission. By simulating end-use actions, Dotcom-Monitor.com
verifies each step within a transaction, not only for proper content,
but also for requested performance. If any test parameters fall
outside of the specified range, responsible personnel are immediately
notified.
One of Dotcom-Monitor's recent customers, a large
online auto parts retailer, approached Dotcom-Monitor with concern
about website performance issues. Even after aggressive marketing
campaigns, this retailer of name brand parts was still noticing
a decline in their online business. Customers persistently complained
about site outages and slow site response times. Despite repeated
complaints by the IT department to the ASP provider and reassurances
from the hosting company that the problems had been resolved, customers
remained dissatisfied.
Realizing a potential disaster for their online
business, the IT department sought a third-party external monitoring
service provider to monitor their e-commerce site 24/7 and identify
the issues and dependencies that were causing website outages.
After one-minute monitoring each day for 7 days,
the following issues were identified:
1. Slow Website Response Dotcom-Monitor's
"report by hour" feature discovered quickly the issues causing poor
performance. The collected one-minute performance data was aggregated
on an hourly basis into a single weekly report. This report provided
summary statistics about transaction by hour. Information such as
average response time (in seconds), required time to access the
website, and the number of successes and failures, provided a clear
picture about site performance during different daily intervals.
Using Dotcom Monitor's proprietary algorithm, it was possible to
calculate the site's slow response periods. Dotcom-Monitor found
that, although the e commerce site was hosted on a dedicated shared
server, during certain times in a day, other applications on the
server consumed most of its resources. This led to slow site response.
This happened only during certain hours, as the conflicting application
was run only a few times a day.
2. Slow Web Page Response The retailer's
IT department also discovered that several pages within a transaction,
such as shipping history and "Invoice printout" were extremely slow.
They took a long time to load, causing shoppers to abandon the site
and instead call customer service. Unfortunately, the other pages
within the same transaction were extremely fast to load. Dues to
this discrepancy within the network, Dotcom-Monitor was able to
identify the specific online pages that were slow and traced the
problem to the database table that those pages were accessing. Once
proper indexing was performed, the issue was resolved.
3. Problem in Accessing the Website During
certain intervals in a day, the retailer's site became unaccessible
altogether. A number of services, such as mail servers, websites,
and proxy servers, would become unavailable to the online world.
To make matters worse, the ISP could not find any issues, but customers
were still complaining. After a "ping pong game" to determine the
problems between the ISP and customers, Dotcom Monitor enables its
"DNS Monitoring." Dotcom-Monitor tested the retailer's DNS servers
by querying specified servers performing "IP resolution". Every
minute, website monitoring showed that one DNS server was occasionally
unable to resolve the address. This implied that the DNS server
supporting the organization was not working consistently. The retailer
upgraded the DNS server and the problem was resolved.
4. Varying Website Response from Different
Geographical Locations Persistent monitoring showed that this
retailer's shopping cart website responded at varying speeds from
different locations. Some customers complained that the site took
too long to open, while others had no issues. Using Dotcom-Monitor's
"Report by Location" feature, which gathers data from multiple remote
agents at different locations, a traceroute snapshot was recorded.
This report was accompanied by the error message from every location
where slowdown was detected. After analyzing the data, it was found
that the ISP hosting the site used several providers that did not
peer properly with certain networks. This network peering problem
was identified and brought to the ISP. They took the necessary actions
to resolve the problem by altering their BGP configuration.
5. Website Downtime required frequent monitoring
The retailer's website occasionally suffered downtime, which led
to customer dissatisfaction. The outages were mostly related to
software glitches that the customer was unable to fix in a short
period of time. These glitches usually required manual intervention.
Enter Dotcom-Monitor. The goal to reduce downtime was to alert key
personnel of any issue immediately. Once website monitoring detected
any problems with the web server, immediate alert by phone and SMS
would be sent to on-call personnel. This decreased downtime periods
from an average of 25 minutes to less than 5 minutes.
In today's highly competitive environment, customer
expectations about website availability and performance grow daily.
What was once acceptable a few years back is no longer the case
today. Website monitoring features, such as immediate alerts, detailed
reports, and aggregated statistics, help clients find and address
issues, and thus enhance the customer experience.
External website monitoring services offered
by companies like Dotcom-Monitor have helped customers explore issues
and discover otherwise elusive data required to take corrective
actions well before receiving customer complaints. Dotcom-Monitor.com
services extend into all industries. It is important to note that
website monitoring services are a must for all mission-critical
services, and are not just limited to the current example of shopping
cart customers. In industries such as finance, insurance, medical,
and manufacturing, or any industry that requires high website uptimes
and excellent website response, it is becoming essential to employ
external website monitoring services.
ABOUT THE SOURCE:
Dotcom-Monitor provides external website
monitoring services and network
monitoring services from agents positioned around the globe,
providing clients with 24/7 monitoring and instant alerts, as well
as useful data to weed out server and connection problems.
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