The global corporate landscape is on the brink of a complete premises lockdown in light of the COVID-19 crisis. Service disruption is inevitable, and enterprises’ business continuity plans are being put to the test. Despite this challenge, it’s heartening to see companies across nations take quick steps to ensure the health and safety of their employees during these trying times.

We’ve been working on something big. We’re building Request Metrics, a new service for web performance monitoring. TrackJS is a fantastic tool to understand web page errors, but what if your pages aren’t broken, just slow? What if the checkout page takes 10 seconds to load? What if that user API is slowing down from your recent database change? What pages have the worst user experience? Request Metrics will tell you that.

Monitoring has been around since the dawn of computing. Recently, however, there’s been a revolution in this field. Cloud native monitoring has introduced new challenges to an old task, rendering former solutions unsuitable for the job. When working with cloud native solutions such as Kubernetes, resources are volatile. Services come and go by design, and that’s fine—as long as the whole system operates in a regular way.

Has this scenario happened to you? You found a service. A SaaS product or hosted service: it could be anything. Maybe it’s a continuous integration service or perhaps it’s a service for capturing comments on your web site. Let’s call it Useful Service. You sign up, and you’re happy with it. Now you depend on it and your fortunes are tied to it. But day in and day out, it’s there for you, working reliably. Then all of the sudden: it’s not.

Things are about to get real in so many ways. Companies are telling employees to work from home, which sounds great in theory — less contact, less chance for the COVID-19 virus to spread. But what about the strain it’s going to place on your IT infrastructure? Your employees will be connecting over a remote virtual infrastructure (Citrix, VMware, AWS, etc) and accessing a variety of in-house web applications (Java, .NET etc.) and SaaS services (Office 365).