Unlocking Peak Performance: Exploring the World of Eggplant Monitoring
How much does unplanned website downtime affect retailers? You don’t have to look far to find some sobering numbers.
There is the immediate effect on revenue of even the briefest downtime to consider, especially at peak times.
There is also the risk of reputational damage. Every significant shopping event is marked with numerous stories about brands’ websites that couldn’t keep up with demand. Finance and banking brands don’t escape either – when their platforms can’t cope with the weight of traffic, it soon hits the headlines.
After every event, there’s a sigh of relief from brands that escaped unscathed – but also a lingering doubt. Could it be us next time?
There are many 24/7/365 website performance monitoring tools that will ping you when your website is down, alerting you to act. But they don’t always provide the reassurance required.
They can be too noisy, giving numerous false positives and no way to triage the most critical issues. The end result can be a tool that feels as if it ‘cries wolf’ – and lead to unnecessary call out or even worse being mostly ignored.
The damage caused by a one-off website outage is one concern. There is also the question of incremental lost revenue from websites that don’t perform at their optimum or fail to deliver an effortless user journey.
The Baymard Institute estimates that the average large-sized e-commerce site could gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rates through better checkout design alone. When you consider that e-commerce sales in the US and EU are $738 billion, a 35.26% increase in conversion rate translates to $260 billion worth of lost orders.
These are serious issues that need to be addressed. What are the options for a reliable website performance monitoring tool? How do you conduct performance testing and user journey monitoring on your website so you can carry out performance optimization and boost conversion rates?
Reliable Website Performance Monitoring
For website performance monitoring, Keysight’s Eggplant Monitoring gives you the stable, highly available, recoverable, automated tool you need.
It uses a methodology for emulated and realsc testing and can detect any issues with network, webpage content, and visitor interactions with web elements.
Eggplant Monitoring can also monitor APIs, FTP, and email monitoring because user journeys rely on multiple technology layers beyond the front-end website experience. In other words, no matter how complex or multi-faceted your user journey is, Eggplant Monitoring can cope.
Across all this, it delivers reliable alerts and notifications to enable you to triage incidents and take immediate action when necessary.
Best Practice Insights for Website Performance Optimization
For many brands, the first question around performance testing and user journey monitoring isn’t: ‘how do we optimize this?’ Instead, it’s more fundamental: ‘where should we look first?’
When it comes to maximizing uptime, we’d suggest several good starting points – and you’ll find more in our Traffic, Trade, and Timing eBook.
One area to consider might be controlling website traffic and throughput based on the speed of the locking mechanism on the database system. This provides a vital safeguard, especially at peak times, against customers attempting to reserve inventory of limited or deep-discount items.
Then look at another bottleneck point for online transactions: payment systems. Most credit card services are provided by third-party vendors via payment gateways, which perform a variety of technical checks and verifications to process secure financial transactions. You might not be able to control these systems – but you can control how customers experience them.
There are also wider third-party management issues such as analytics, multivariate testing, re-targeting, payment gateways, and social media integration. They are all vital parts of the modern retailer’s toolkit. But any one of these could slow down or fail under load. What happens when that happens?
Optimizing the user journey is an even more complex question. Exploratory testing has value, but likely won’t have the coverage required with the resource available. The solution is to be able to conduct realistic user monitoring using an automated tool.
Again, Keysight’s Eggplant Monitoring can help. It provides endlessly customizable user journey monitoring so you can analyze the visitor experience. It also has comprehensive reporting capabilities for effective performance optimization.
The Key to Effective User Journey Monitoring
Eggplant Monitoring is a SaaS synthetic monitoring tool that simulates and monitors key interactions. It navigates your website and replicates your visitor’s exact behavior, gathering the performance data you need to understand your users better.
Endlessly customizable user journey scripting gives it flexibility – options include dynamic parameterization of variables, retry logic, dynamic date selection, item selection from lists, and much more. The Eggplant Monitoring support team is also available to work hand-in-hand with you to maximize the value of its capabilities, including customized reporting that aids efficient diagnoses of the issues highlighted by each test.
You can even run manual tests from the portal and watch the progress of the test as it is executed in real time.
Comprehensive Reporting and Insights for Effective Performance Optimization
The reporting functionality of Eggplant Monitoring gives you the ability to drive further user journey improvements.
For example, there is a report that offers a comprehensive analysis of your monitor’s performance over a specified period. It provides insights into download duration, CPU metrics, and UX timing metrics.
It helps you analyze monitor performance across different timing groups, identify issues within specific stages of the request, monitor changes in Download Duration and compare it with Page Size, UX timings, and CPU timing.
An availability report offers a detailed view of the proportion of tests in each severity level over a specified time range. It can be used to assess the uptime and downtime of a monitor over a specific period, identify your worst-performing monitors, and track how long a monitor remains in each severity level.
The error report offers a comprehensive list of all errors. It’s valuable for getting an overview of all errors within a specified time frame, identifying currently open errors, finding specific error references quickly, and drilling down into error details and diagnostic information for troubleshooting.
Equipped with all these insights, you are ready to take targeted, data-driven action and deliver measurable results.
Optimize Website Performance
Want to find out more about Eggplant Monitoring? You can read the solution brief, Monitoring Websites for Optimal Performance.
For a full list of reports, all of which are customizable, see the Eggplant Monitoring Insights Portal Report Summaries.
You can also schedule a demo.
Because with Eggplant Monitoring in your tech stack, you can have consistent, reliable website performance monitoring so you can optimize your website performance and deliver an enhanced user experience.