Key Takeaways
- Website and web application downtime can have serious negative effects for businesses, including loss of revenue and damage to a brand’s reputation.
- It’s impossible to guarantee 100% uptime, but businesses can and should endeavor to achieve it, and DevOps teams must have a performance and uptime monitoring plan for every business-critical function their websites and web applications perform for users.
Business operations have been revolutionized by the advent of web-computing services. Many organizations now look to decrease or eliminate expenditure, increase efficiency, and maximize profits by moving their processes online because of the unmatched flexibility and ability to scale the cloud affords them.
With this sea-change to online, cloud-based operations for businesses has come a new challenge: availability. Online businesses is expected to operate at scale around the clock, globally, performatively and at scale. The Internet doesn’t take a break for holidays. Online infrastructure has grown to meet this challenge and are correspondingly complex and interconnected.
If one infrastructure component falters, it can lead to downtime for users and disastrous results for a business’ bottom line and reputation. Luckily, serious businesses have uptime and performance monitoring tools like ours at Dotcom-Monitor, which they leverage both to monitor their websites and web applications and to make improvements for their users. With a monitoring tool, you can ensure the availability of your websites and web applications around the clock from locations globally. In short, you’ll know when a website suffers performance issues and downtime, and we’ll help you fix it.
This article looks at the importance of uptime for your website, the consequences of downtime, and how Dotcom-Monitor will help you and your development team give your online users the best possible experience.
What Is Performance Monitoring
Websites and web applications drive information retrieval and display, user experience, commerce and more. Understanding how your websites, web applications, and any APIs these may rely on for functionality is essential to comprehending the optimal experience you want to deliver your users.
Performance monitoring for websites and web applications calls for knowledge of exactly how a user will interact with a website or application and an understanding of business critical components to these processes, so you can effectively monitor not just whether a given website or application loads but if it loads quickly enough and if every function works to serve your users’ needs.
The first, critical piece to monitor is uptime. That is: is your website or web application online? And if you do experience downtime, what can be done about it?
What Causes Downtime
There are a number of things that may cause your website or web application to go offline for your users. Let’s consider some of the leading causes of downtime.
Hardware Failure
If you operate your own servers, as some businesses do in order to secure and protect user data, you may experience hardware issues that cause downtime. Most computing has moved into the cloud for this reason.
Software Failure
Software failures are mostly attributed to human errors–weak code, poor management, lack of communication between stakeholders etc. These can be remedied easily if you follow a plan that evaluates these risks beforehand. If you and your team make major changes to your website, this can easily cause downtime. Seemingly simple things like removing a plugin or a third party integration can have massive downstream effects in production, and lead to outages.
The simplest way to address this is through a thorough DevOps testing and QA process, so you and your team can isolate issues prior to pushing to production, and to have monitoring tools in place so when downtime occurs you’ll receive comprehensive reports in order to quickly troubleshoot issues and prevent future problems.
Network Issues
Network downtime is a specific issue referring to inaccessibility of a network due to the failure of a particular system, application, or the entire network. Causes of network downtime include maintenance activities, unexpected technical failures, or even power cuts or natural disasters.
The world is unpredictable, and there’s no way to guarantee 100% uptime. But businesses can, and should, endeavor to get as close as possible. Users expect it. Because of this, performance monitoring should be part of every serious DevOps team’s toolkit.
Why You Need an Uptime Monitoring Tool
You may have spent a great deal of time and money on getting your website situated in a critical market sector. Lots of research and hard work has gone into the process. However, some faults may linger and cause your website to “switch off” for a while.
You may not be aware of what has caused this sudden downtime, and therefore, wouldn’t have enough tools at your disposal to fix the issue. We at Dotcom-Monitor have the tools you need to elevate your website’s performance and get it up and running again in the case of downtime.
How Dotcom-Monitor Monitors Your Website
Instant Alerts
A burst of traffic to your website, a viral blogpost, or sudden network issues can all cause downtime. To prepare for such situations, it’s absolutely essential you have a tool to tell you when your website goes down and help your development team understand exactly why. This is where Dotcom-Monitor comes into play.
If and when your website or web application fails, our monitoring tools will send an email, text, or both, to alert you and your team on effectively any schedule you can imagine. Dotcom-Monitor will also capture real-time screenshots of affected pages, so you and your team can respond quickly at exactly the point of failure.
You do not want your users to be the people who inform you of downtime. Not only is it unprofessional, but it means you’re not treating your websites and web applications with the seriousness they deserve. Businesses that choose not to invest in an uptime monitoring tool risk serious downstream consequences, as users are given a bad impression and less likely to return.
Troubleshooting & Detailed Analysis
Downtime is unavoidable. When it happens, you want to know why a website has gone down, and you want to know it as quickly as possible. Dotcom-Monitor gives you the reports you need to troubleshoot problems and find the root-cause behind a given outage. This allows you to fix an ongoing issue as quickly as possible and will guide your future development so you can prevent the same or similar issues from occurring again.
Maximum uptime builds your brand’s credibility and leads to happier users, more return visits and engagement, and the best possible reputation your business can enjoy online. Monitoring is key.
Consider Dotcom-Monitor To Monitor Your Website
Dotcom-Monitor’s website monitoring tool serves to update you and your team whenever your website goes down or performance begins to degrade. With over 30 monitoring locations all over the world, Dotcom-Monitor lets you know as soon as your website goes down or suffers performance issues in any of these locations.
You’ll also have access to real-time dashboards that give you key metrics on how your website performs and what is the root cause of any downtime. You’ll know instantly when your website goes down with real-time alerts, which you can customize according to your preferences and the structure of your team, making collaboration easy. Feel free to book a one-on-one demo with Dotcom-Monitor today or sign up for a free trial. We’ll be glad to hear from you and support you in your mission to achieve maximum uptime for your websites and applications.
