Collection doesn’t equal detection. When your eyeballs are pulsing from the stress of looking at multiple screens, logs, performance metrics, and messages of interpretation from your team; it’s challenging not to experience your own personal system overload. “Thinking too much leads to paralysis by analysis.
George Romero’s zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead, is the perfect analogy for a lot like the DevOps experience. Your cluster of services is like your Monroeville Mall. Your safe haven where you live and work for years on end, toiling away at survival. But who are the zombies? The answer isn’t always clear when you’re busy chasing down alerts at 2 AM.
It’s always in the early dawn hours – an SMS alert on your phone forces you to drag up your eyelids and look at a text: your site traffic has surpassed its usual threshold. You start to run through the possibilities as you drift off in search of a few more minutes of sleep but traffic keeps rapidly increasing and your brain jumps to a conclusion…could it be a DDoS Attack?
We once asked whether it was possible to remain both incompetent and in business. We concluded that while incompetency is not a desirable trait, it is surprisingly possible to remain in business for a fairly short while. What we have learned in Q3 is that complacency allows internet downtime to fester. Our Destimate for Q3 of 2020 is fairly high. We expect the average business with monitoring and minimal IT resources stand to lose 17.4% of revenue on the conservative side, and as much as 22.35%.
It was a dark and stormy night. Not really, of course; it was warm and pleasantly mild (the weather never seems to co-operate on these occasions), but indulge me by imagining appropriate meteorological conditions for the spine-tingling story I’m about to relate. It was Morgan’s very first night on call, and they were a mite nervous, as you can imagine.
Migrations carry a setup cost and engineers don’t work for free. Even under the most ideal conditions, it’s possible moving data between web monitoring providers will result in some missing feature or differing functionality. That’s just life. If you’re facing a migration you sometimes have to make do with the cards you’re dealt. But it’s not all doom and gloom! We hope this checklist will help you play like you’ve got pocket aces.
If there’s no customer, there’s no job. In a competitive marketplace, every site element matters from the functionality of your service to your UI; your documentation to your marketing. Your SLA should mirror that structure. Building a strong customer experience is about consistency on every level. The key is visibility, offering all the verification your customers need with an intuitive click of the mouse.
A hosted status page gives you the peace of mind that users can always answer one simple question: is it up or down. Hosted status pages work because they offer third-party confirmation your services are up. If your site goes down, the third party is likely not down and you can use them to refer to your status. Status pages are your personal 24 hour news cycle. Regardless of if you’re up or down, customer service fields fewer support tickets, and users praise your transparency.
A website performance audit is a full analysis of your marketing, usability, and search ranking. Audits are no sunny afternoon picnic. For your team, the task may be equivalent to getting sound-blasted with unexpected microphone feedback. Like feedback, a positive gain loop between a microphone and a loudspeaker, building up your site’s SEO with content, keywords, and ads increases your visibility to your audience.
There’s an old proverb; an inch of time is an inch of gold but you can’t buy that inch of time with an inch of gold. In the landscape of ecommerce we hold true to that proverb, and though you can’t purchase uptime outright, you can guard it with website monitoring. Time equals money but the value of convenience should also be considered. When ease of use returns profits, speed and functionality become primary resources. How can website monitoring improve your user experience?
