This past month was a hot one for outages. The Facebook family of apps continues to struggle with multiple outages, the London Stock Exchange had to open late one day this past month, and banks across the world experienced issues. Here’s your August outage report, including insights from our own monitoring at the Uptime.com HQ.
What makes synthetic monitoring a crucial tool to measure the customer experience? When I buy something online, it takes about one to three minutes. That time depends on the complexity of forms I encounter, whether I have an account with the retailer, and how easy the site is to navigate. Of course, there are lots of other variables I don’t notice that also affect my buying experience.
Digital experience relies heavily on the performance of your website, its servers, and your applications. The user experience is most impacted by load time or responsiveness. The fastest applications usually win the day, but there’s more to website performance monitoring than simply measuring speed. Website performance monitoring looks holistically at your site or application.
Slack went down and Twitter activity went up, but what did your team do with its downtime? Did you sit and ping your workspace over and over, waiting for the inevitable return? Did you give up and have a coffee? Did you use it to stay productive and get things done? Ok, I’m not your boss and sorry I asked that last question. Maybe if you were not productive it’s because an outage makes it hard to focus.
How fast is your website, and how does application performance affect the user experience even when small changes are applied? If careful attention is not paid to content delivery and hosting, speed and performance at scale become a full-time task. API latency, performance issues during traffic surges, and third-party services all play a role in general performance.
In April of 2018, security researcher Kevin Beaumont discovered an interesting case of web defacement on the NHS Insights website. He’d expected to find data related to patient surveys about their experiences with the National Health Service. Instead, he found a very different kind of message. A review of the page’s cache suggested that this eerie music and imposing image had been in place for at least the previous five days.
Website availability is a top priority for enterprise IT teams. Depending on the purpose of your website, even a couple of seconds of downtime can cost big money. That’s why monitoring for website availability issues is a critical part of any IT team’s overall mission. Downtime happens. But sometimes it can be prevented. We’ve put together this guide to help you get the most out of your website uptime monitor. Let’s dive in, shall we?
An API check is comprised of multiple HTTP/S checks configured for uptime monitoring. In API monitoring, tracking latency and availability provide first notice of a potential problem. The same extends to general uptime monitoring, where serving the best and fastest user experience is critical. Functionally, an API and HTTP/S check might do the job of monitoring API endpoints. Both can post or expect strings in response, and both provide alert of downtime.
With a shift toward the Internet of Things, where always-on connectivity is paramount, digital experience monitoring (DEM) is a transformational way of looking at application and end-user monitoring. DEM asks more than whether you have a slow website, it looks at how every step in the user’s experience performs at a granular level. This discipline measures the website’s response to the user’s needs.
Cloudflare, a company that provides CDN services to major websites around the world, recently experienced an outage that took down many of their customers’ sites. The outage began around 7AM EST, and many major companies, including web hosting company WP Engine and chat service Discord also experienced outages due to issues over at Cloudflare. Cloudflare has identified the source of the problem and implemented a temporary fix until the issues can be resolved permanently.
