A Riddle, a Sale, and the Importance of Proactive End-User Monitoring

By Rachel Frnka

Finally, the days are getting longer, the sun is heating up, and I’m able to spend all my free time outside soaking it in here in Austin, Texas. As I was laying out this weekend, I came up with a riddle for you: what do sunscreen, a life vest, and SolarWinds^® Scopify^® have in common?

Whether it’s real or metaphorical crickets I’m hearing, here’s the answer: proactivity.

You see, I love the sunshine—I adore the warm sensation of the bright summer sun shining on my skin… but not the sunburn that can follow. I always have about 5 bottles of SPF 50 on hand. Being prepared for the unknown is important this summer, which is why a proactive web application monitoring strategy is your key to not getting burned.

If your website influences the success of your business, it needs to be watched all the time to make sure its available and working for your users. Here are a few tests to keep your site delivering the best experience it can:

Uptime Monitoring

The biggest disaster you need to prevent this summer is your website throwing a 503 error. Uptime monitoring is a synthetic transaction check that tests the availability of your website, applications, and servers from around the world, or the areas where you do business. If there’s an issue, tools with comprehensive uptime monitoring will help you diagnose the root cause of the problem, so you can get it back up before your customers notice.

Your website going down is as unpredictable as a summer rain shower—make sure you have the coverage to know when it happens.

Transaction Monitoring

If your website has a checkout process, a login form, or search experience, then you know making sure these activities—known in the monitoring world as transactions—are running correctly. If they aren’t, you could miss out on leads and sales, or leave customers frustrated.

Transaction monitoring synthetically stimulates these business-critical experiences with your website, so you can know the moment a site flow stops working correctly. Transaction checks also test from real browsers around the world and break down exactly which step in the flow failed and why.

Alerts

Alerts are like the lifeguard at the community pool who blows their whistle every time someone is acting out of line with the rules. Alerts are preconfigured to the uptime and transaction checks that matter for your business and immediately let you know when one fails. However, instead of a whistle, they’re passed through the notification services you’re already using, such as Slack, PagerDuty, email, or SMS.

Not having a proactive web application monitoring solution is almost like relying on aloe vera to treat preventable sunburns, cortisone cream instead of bug spray, or a lifeguard to throw a lifebuoy to you.

Scopify combines the synthetic tests you need, such as uptime and transaction checks, with real user monitoring (RUM) to make sure your end users experience your web app exactly how you want. Leveraging 100+ probes worldwide, Scopify helps you get a holistic view of the performance of your website, all from your user’s perspective. Scopify is also extremely easy to get started. Set your first check with as little as a URL, or leverage tools like the no-code transaction recorder, to immediately see real-time data of your web app’s performance.

Don’t get caught with a reactive end-user monitoring plan this summer.

You can start monitoring today for free for 30 days.

We’re also offering 20% off annual and monthly plans with code SUNSCREEN20 through July 31, 2021.*

START MONITORING

*This promotion expires on July 31, 2021 and applies to your initial online purchase of SolarWinds^® Scopify^®, annual and monthly licenses. Not valid for prior purchases. The promotional code can be used only once. Offer may not be combined with any other promotion or discount. SolarWinds Scopify reserves the right to modify or cancel promotion at any time. Void where prohibited.