Website Monitoring: Learn More

 

Fast Loading

Why should you worry about the performance of your site...

Forrester Consulting has identified that, "two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper's expectation for a web page to load" [1]. Furthermore, research by Microsoft and Google have found that a delay of just 0.5 second impacts key business metrics including:

• Greater bounce rate (visitors quickly leave after viewing the first page)
• Fewer pages per visit
• Less revenue per visitor
• Lower search engine rankings [2]

If your business is online, site performance monitoring is a must. But conducting in-house performance monitoring diverts resources from your core business; it can be time consuming, expensive and may not identify errors caused by providers such as, your ISPs or hosting company. In addition, any in-house solution is likely to only monitor from a single point so, you have no way of knowing if your site is accessible to clients in different locations around the world.

 

With a globally distributed infrastructure of 43 monitoring stations, WatchMouse continuously checks your sites, servers and applications to deliver verification that your site is available and properly functioning. WatchMouse conducts checks from an external perspective, to replicate real users' experiences and provide your business with independent information about your website's performance & availability. Results are presented in a sophisticated, web-based Customer Console.

In addition to monitoring your internal systems, WatchMouse can be used to verify that your suppliers are meeting agreed SLAs. Having an accurate, independent report, enables your business to address problems and make informed decisions about who to depend on to keep your operation up and running.

Via your WatchMouse Customer Console, authorised users have access to full results and complete control over all performance monitors and subscription, allowing you to match your monitoring requirements & budget. Extensive reporting functionality makes it easy for your business to identify and proactively monitor trends, such as a slow decline in performance which otherwise easily goes undetected but causes your online customers considerable frustration.

 

Product features

• A globally distributed infrastructure of 43 monitoring stations and multiple SMS gateways, providing full redundancy and enabling your business to pinpoint site issues before customers start to encounter them.
• Immediate, Self Service Solution: WatchMouse can be quickly set up via the intuitive Customer Console and start to deliver results immediately. Authorised users can view, edit and modify monitors, alert types and store all your website performance information.
• Accurate results: emulating real user activities, WatchMouse checks your website from monitoring stations spread across numerous countries, verify your website's availability and performance across the globe. If access drops from a certain location, WatchMouse will corroborate the problem using at least one other monitoring stations, before reporting the issue.
• Automated alerting: minor issues are logged in your WatchMouse Customer Console. to allow your business the time to rectify serious problems before your customers notice, severe issue notifications are sent via email, SMS or pager to your key personnel.
• Full reporting functionality: using the WatchMouse Customer Console's reporting functionality and customizable user permissions, you can ensure your personnel are provided with the appropriate information and access. You define who has 'read only' or 'editing' permissions and set reporting distribution & frequencies.
• Root cause analysis - identifies the cause of the issue so your business can rapidly rectify site issues
• Integrated with Website analytics: via your WatchMouse Customer Console you can view and compare, side by side, your WatchMouse reports with website visitor statistics from NedStat & Google analytics.
• A Central repository: as many businesses have staff and offices in multiple locations, the web based Customer Console provides a central repository and allows you to assign a status to individual issues, enter comments and delegate responsibilities. By checking in your Customer Console, your whole team can see what action has been taken to address identified performance problems.
• A full range of monitoring tests; supporting 20 protocols, e.g, http, https, ping, pop3, smtp, imap, ftp, sftp, telnet, ldap, dns, and sip.

All website monitoring features

 

Always Available

Downtime costs European businesses on average £300.000 per hour [3]

Downtime brings your business to a halt: customers can't reach your site, online transactions and client emails aren't received, your helpdesk gets overloaded with complaints, while staff sit around waiting for systems to start working again.

Annual Uptime	Annual Downtime	Business Days
95%	438 hours	Almost 3 weeks
99%	87 hours, 36 minutes	Almost 4 days
99.9%	8 hours, 45 minutes	A whole business day
99.99%	53 minutes	Time to eat lunch :-)

Every minute of downtime can mean thousands in lost revenue, annoyed customers, and a negative impact on your reputation. If you have a business critical website, you need 24/7 monitoring.

WatchMouse are a leading global provider; continuously investing in infrastructure and building our expertise. With over 43 global monitoring stations, no one offers better coverage or greater peace of mind for sites, servers and application monitoring. Our global monitoring stations detect any site downtime, errors, vulnerabilities or bottle necks and issue alerts to ensure you are the first to know when your site is not performing.

 

Product features

• Save time and money with an easy to configure web-based system - not complex set-up or software installation
• A global, fully redundant infrastructure for monitoring and SMS alerting
• Immediate results
• Automated email, SMS and pager alerts for severe issues
• Self-service via a web-based customer console for easy management of monitors, reports etc.
• Independent verification of internal and/or supplier performance against SLAs
• Detailed and customizable reports to help drive site performance
• Root cause analysis - identifies the cause of the issue so your business can rapidly rectify site issues
• Public Status Pages - hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, to provide your customers with information about the status of your online services
• Peace of mind that your monitoring is outsourced to industry experts

All website monitoring features

 

Functional

Your site is up, but does it always work?

Strangeloop Networks found that site performance improvements deliver a huge ROI with, optimization resulting in a 16% increase in conversion rates and a 5.5% increase in average order value [4]

WatchMouse Transaction Monitoring (also referred to as 'scripting', 'functional testing' or 'web application testing') checks the behaviour of your site and identifies exactly where bottle necks or problems occur. Transaction Monitoring ensures you know how your customers experience your site when they interact with it from different locations.

Transaction monitoring scripts can be written to identify a wide variety of possible issues, from slow page response times, to monitoring the behaviour of forms such as login pages and shopping carts. Transaction monitoring scripts should be run from a global infrastructure. Without using a worldwide network of checkpoints, you cannot accurately predict how your site behaves when customers interact with it from locations all around the world.

WatchMouse enables you to easily upload your transaction monitoring scripts and run them using our global infrastructure of 43 checkpoints. In the dashboard a detailed breakdown is available that gives insight in the performance of individual steps in the transaction. The scripts can be composed with the open source tool jMeter, and WatchMouse has also partnered with Badboy Software to provide customers with access to a free scripting tool.

 

Product features

• Easy transaction recording and uploading from within the BadBoy recorder
• Expert and cross platform script recording available via Apache JMeter
• Detailed performance breakdown of individual steps in replayed transactions
• Use a maximum of 20 steps and 1MB of bandwidth per script execution, every five minutes
• Reuse the same script to monitor multiple environments through variable substitutions from the WatchMouse dashboard
• Fine-grained control for monitoring HTTP response codes from APIs
• Extract variables from XML and HTML responses using XPath or regular expressions

All website monitoring features

 

Safe

One in three UK businesses has been the victim of a major security break in [5]

With new vulnerabilities being identified every day, the latest firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems will not protect your organisation if they are not kept up-to-date and configured correctly. In addition to new vulnerabilities, any changes to your system's configuration may open up new paths. Being audited 'all safe' last week does not mean your systems are fine today.

WatchMouse Periodic Vulnerability Scanning is an affordable way to routinely check your company's security exposure and eliminate the risks associated with manual audits. Utilising the most up-to-date database of known vulnerabilities, WatchMouse identifies any security risks and provides you with the right peace-of-mind, because your software applications are being scanned from the perspective of a hacker who is outside your organisation.

 

WatchMouse Periodic Vulnerability Scan gives you answers to the following questions:

• Is my website or server hackable?
• Which vulnerabilities on our website/server are visible to the outside world?
• Have the latest software security patches been applied?
• What are the security risks when we launch our new website?

 

Product features

• Immediate results via an outsourced solution - no software installation or hardware purchase needed
• Peace of mind that your website and servers are being scanned against an expert database of over 34000 known vulnerabilities
• Access to an Industry Leading Customer Console to check results, leave comments, adjust scans, set alerts, and view full details
• Routine, professional scanning from the hacker's perspective, external to your organisation
• Real-time e-mail, SMS & pager alerts when severe vulnerabilities are found
• Confidence that your scanning is outsourced to industry experts so you don't need expensive in-house resources
• Fully customizable - pay for what you need and adjust your settings at any time

All website monitoring features

 

[1] http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20090914005141&newsLang=en
[2] Eric Schurman (Microsoft) & Jake Brutlag (Google) presented "The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search" in June 2009 at, the Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference, San Jose, CA.
[3] Study conducted by Global Switch (a leading provider of purpose-built high-specification data centres), published 9 May 2007 at: http://www.backupreview.info/2007/05/13/downtime-costs-european-businesses-300k-per-hour/
[4] Strangeloop research reported up by Alistair Croll at http://www.watchingwebsites.com/archives/proof-that-speeding-up-websites-improves-online-business
[5] http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,2085467,00.htm