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<\/p>\nYou are definitely registering user traffic in your store. You are most likely also tracking the position of your website on Google. You are also highly likely to track mentions of your brand on the Internet. But do you monitor the availability and proper functioning of your store?<\/p>\n
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Your store is not indestructible and there may be various types of malfunctions. The server, connection, and database can all fail. An important form or the third step of the purchasing process may stop working. Your website may also start to work slower than usual.
\nAll these situations will have a negative impact on your sales. That is why it is worth making sure that you are the first to learn about any failure, making it possible for you to react before the users notice.<\/p>\n
E-commerce<\/a> is an industry in which website failures and defects translate into measurable losses in the most direct way.<\/p>\n When the online store is unavailable or is not working properly:<\/p>\n You cannot avoid problems with the functioning of your store as there are many potential causes. Physical damage to devices, overloads, system faults, application errors, human mistakes, etc. An additional benefit of monitoring the availability is the ability to use the monitoring data to justify claims against the hosting provider under the SLA.<\/p>\n It’s easy to say “monitor availability and proper functioning”, but what exactly does it mean? Availability is rather obvious, but how to monitor the proper functioning?<\/p>\n This is a basic monitoring feature and should preferably be monitored at intervals of no less than 1 minute. It consists in checking the server’s response and its response time. It provides detection of total failures\u2014server, connection, and DNS going down, missing application files, etc.<\/p>\n Content monitoring is based on checking if a defined piece of text or code is being displayed at a given URL. This allows us to detect failures of e.g. a database\u2014when the website is theoretically available but is displayed without the content (white page or empty templates).<\/p>\n Ever since Google announced that it includes website speed in its ranking, monitoring the speed of loading has started to make even more sense. This feature consists in measuring the full website loading time (full-page)\u2014that is, with all embedded graphics, styles, and scripts. Exceeding the defined limit is treated as a failure.<\/p>\n Your website can have various features, but the shopping process<\/strong> is, of course, the most important matter for any e-commerce website. And a failure can occur at any of its stages. Depending on your needs, you can monitor other features related to your store, e.g. cohesion of key documents (detection of unauthorized changes), availability of the mail, database, FTP, DNS servers, etc.<\/p>\n The default monitoring tests settings are not always the best. Usually, these are simply the most commonly used options. In addition to e-mail alerts, notifications sent via SMS are most commonly used. In the case of non-critical tests, limit the days and hours in which you will receive text messages in the settings\u2014so that the monitoring system does not wake you up at 3:00 in the morning. Alerts can be sent to multiple recipients\u2014you can decide who will receive notifications from which test. For example, the server administrator can be notified of a complete unavailability of the website while notifications about problems with the purchasing process can be sent to the persons responsible for the application.<\/p>\n\n
\nWhat you can do is minimize the response time to a failure\u2014using a monitoring system that will alert you immediately when a problem is detected. You will learn about the unavailability of the entire website before the users\u2014you will also find defects that you might not have noticed for a long time (most likely only from the sales reports for a given period).<\/p>\nWhat to monitor in the store<\/h2>\n
Availability<\/h3>\n
Content<\/h3>\n
Speed<\/h3>\n
Functions<\/h3>\n
\nThe monitoring system, pretending to be a real user, goes through the purchasing process in accordance with the scenario you have defined. For example, it first finds a product using the search engine, then selects its parameters, adds it to the shopping cart, changes the quantity, provides the buyer’s data, selects the method of delivery and payment, and finally places the order.<\/p>\nOther features<\/h3>\n
How to optimally configure monitoring<\/h2>\n
\nBelow we suggest how to set up monitoring in a way that will allow you, for example, to avoid being flooded with irrelevant notifications, but at the same time not to miss the really important events.<\/p>\nAlerts<\/h3>\n
\nYou can also define an alerting pattern\u2014for example, by setting the system not to bother you with failures lasting less than 2 minutes, or to remind you of an ongoing failure every 5 minutes.<\/p>\nReports<\/h3>\n
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