Cloud Expo on Ulitzer

Web-wise, it’s a changed world from even a few years ago. The number of online transactions (defined as everything from an exchange of money, to searches, to downloads, etc.) has exploded because companies now use the Web to manage sales, marketing, communications, and product support strategies.

Transactions have also grown via dynamic pages, secure Web sites, integrated search capabilities, and multimedia content. At the same time, transactions have become more complex.

But, as rewarding as they are to business website owners, transactions are also risky – because there’s no guarantee that everything will go 100% smoothly. They can break down anywhere in the process, for example, from sluggish servers or a search engine breakdown.

And when that happens your competitors are never far – just a click or two away.

Fortunately, companies can take a pro-active approach against transaction failure with 24/7 website transaction monitoring. But successful monitoring means capturing all facets of complex online transactions and easily identifying issues that arise.

I recently read an excellent white paper that laid out four key aims of good transaction monitoring. And I’ll go so far as to say that these are principles and characteristics that you should look for in a third-party service. Your monitoring service should:

- Take into consideration the user’s experience. Is your provider taking into account the complexity of a transaction, for example, interconnecting Web communications providers, advertisers and content providers, content distribution networks—all lying behind your company’s firewall? Also, is your monitoring service getting a comprehensive look at user experiences across the globe (that’s why they call it the World Wide Web!). There are going to be differences because there are variances in access speeds and networking technologies. That’s why it’s crucial to pick a cloud-based provider, which can monitor transaction performance from anywhere users live.

- Monitor the entire transaction. Ask your provider if they can monitor a transaction across its entire life span, for example, clicking through multiple pages. And, if a problem should occur, can they tell you – with details – at what point the failure happened?

- Make it simple. Is your monitoring service making it easy for you, or is it giving you or your IT department more to do? Your service should be able to do all the heavy lifting and give you the information you need to know in easy-to-figure out reports.

- Be reliable. Your solution should give you the following information: whether a problem exists, where it exists, and whether it’s something that needs your resources to fix. Also, you should have enough confidence in the service to know that its monitoring metrics reflect real problems and not because the service itself is faulty.

To make sure your online business or organization is handling transactions successfully, you need to be on guard around the clock and be vigilant in looking for problems. Luckily, with today’s cloud infrastructure intact, you can find really good monitoring services that can do this job for you – hassle-free.