SaaS-based businesses are on the rise more than ever. Old businesses are rushing to turn their legacy software into SaaS-based solutions and new businesses are popping up offering SaaS-based solutions to everything imaginable. SaaS-based solutions are made up of multi-layered complex architecture with both internal and external components that require strategic constant monitoring and optimization. To have an edge over your competitors, you need to make sure your end users are experiencing better service, 24/7.
Challenges with SaaS-based Applications
With a Saas-based business, comes many challenges for making sure that the application is behaving as expected and providing the value proposition that you are promising to your end users. That means you have to rethink your strategy for monitoring and maintaining your SaaS-based application to serve your end users in a fast, reliable, and secure way. When your SaaS application is your business, you must be able to quickly solve the challenges that arise to avoid any major hiccups. Let’s take a look at areas of focus and challenges that should be part of your SaaS-based business monitoring strategy.
- Availability. First thing first, with so many components packed together in a SaaS-based business, if any of them is having a problem, your application may become inaccessible to your users. Unannounced downtime is every business’s nightmare. It means you lose users, you lose credibility, you lose revenue.
- Page speed. With a plethora of options available to your users, you want to make sure that when someone visits your application, your application is fast enough to avoid bouncing. With each second’s delay, you are losing exponential percentages of visitors who can turn into revenue-generating users.
- Performance. Once your users landed on your application, they are going to perform transactions that you want them to. So, you need to make sure all the transactions are healthy and the overall performance of your application is aligned with end user expectations.
- Web and mobile experience. Whether it is a web application, a mobile application, or both, your users should have a seamless experience without noticing any gap in the service. For this, you need to make sure that all your APIs, including third-party APIs, are intact and healthy.
- Monitor resource usage and fees. When your SaaS application scales, it is important to monitor all the resources such as transaction costs, memory, disk utilization, network bandwidth with standard and custom KPIs to optimize the resources and their cost.
- Automate monitoring tasks and consolidate data. Saas-based business is often a highly distributed infrastructure with many moving parts. Hence, it is a best practice to automate monitoring tasks with high configuration support and consolidate end-to-end monitoring data on a single platform.
- Test with the user experience in mind. A brief case study: electric car website FindMyElectric.com was able to shave 4.2 seconds off of the search functionality of users looking for a used Tesla Model 3 via continuous testing and monitoring with Dotcom-Monitor’s BrowserView platform.
- Security. Data is at the core of any typically SaaS-based business, regardless of the service provided. That means you want to secure all the data generated on the platform more than anything. Monitoring should make sure that you are scanning and analyzing all endpoints and networks continuously to prevent any data loss and data breach.
Proactive Monitoring: Doing it Right
SaaS-based business is all about user experience. Period. So, don’t wait until you have an issue. Incorporate an end-to-end monitoring strategy early on and collect meaningful data to proactively resolve issues and optimize your SaaS-based application. Also, your monitoring strategy should be able to provide you with useful actionable data about your users, flow, performance, third-party components, etc, in one place, for a comprehensive analysis and proper automation. For best practices, it’s advisable to have these following tools in your SaaS-based application monitoring strategy:
- Web Application Monitoring. Ensuring the paths your users take through your application need to be flawless. For information about key performance metrics such as response time, error rate, flow, transaction health, accessibility, availability, and resource utilization, implement a solution to monitor these key metrics.
- Web Page Monitoring. Identifying page load performance issues within a page allows you to quickly fix any elements that may be causing your pages to perform
- Infrastructure Monitoring. For monitoring both cloud and on-premises infrastructure and complete real-time visibility of services, performance, cost, security, data, and network.
- Web Services Monitoring. For monitoring uptime, performance, and functionality of various APIs and network protocols, such as SOAP, GET/POST, TCP, and third-party APIs, for both website and mobile.
With all this information, you will be able to quickly resolve any issue and provide a reliable and seamless experience to your end users for your Saas-based businees. And for the best implementation of your monitoring strategy, aim for having all these tools from a single vendor/platform for uniform integration, data collection, and automation.
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