IT Needs to do Better Job of Communicating Value of Monitoring
Chances are at least a percentage of the IT pros who read this blog are monitoring professionals. That means, you make sure your web site is running optimally and it’s important work. Problem is not enough people seem to get the value of what you do. I read an interview with Sergey Chernyshev, who is Director of web systems and applications at truTV as part of the O’Reilly Radar Velocity Profile series, which helps publicize the upcoming Velocity Conference. When asked what his biggest challenge as a Monitoring pro, Chernyshev answered this way: The toughest is to make people...
read moreInstagram Vs.1940s Census Data – Web Site Traffic Spike Showdown
Last week we had a unique opportunity to observe two web sites experiencing traffic spikes. One came through with flying colors planning for the spike and handling it with aplomb. The other one crashed and burned under heavy traffic pressure. The site that crashed? The long-awaited 1940s census data site. The site that planned well: Instagram. Let’s look at this tale of two spikes starting with the positive story first. Last week Instagram, the photo sharing site, launched Instagram for Android. According to an LA Times article, Instagram boasts 30 million iOS users and had an Android...
read moreResearchers Say Web Visitors Could Bolt After Just 250ms Delay
It only takes a minute girl To fall in love, to fall in love ~Tavares, It only takes a minute In the old Tavares song you had a whole minute to fall in love. In the world of web pages, the New York Times reports that you might not have the long. How about as long as takes to blink? Harry Schum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft, quoted in the article gives the bad news. “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,” Shum told the Times. That means every delay no matter how minute...
read moreSometimes All The Testing in the World Doesn’t Help
Over the last several weeks, we’ve written several posts in this space about the importance of being prepared when it comes to launching web sites or applications. That means stress testing and other sand box scenarios to try to the best of your ability to make sure that your web site or application can handle whatever the world throws at it. And that’s all well and good as far as it goes, except that it’s impossible to plan for every contingency. That’s because it’s impossible to reproduce every scenario that could possbily happen in a test bed. It just...
read moreLet Target’s Issues Be a Lesson for Your Site
A week ago, Target’s web site went down for the second time in six weeks, and unlike the first time when Target was launching a big promotion, it doesn’t appear that there was a really good reason for it. According to an article on Computerworld, the company confirmed that the site went down for two and half hours last Tuesday, but company spokespeople declined to say why. It’s hard to blame them. The outage had to be embarrassing, but every company should know by now that transparency is all important in these instances. Regular readers may recall we covered the first...
read moreFree Real User Monitoring
This blog is sponsored by Correlsense,
the maker of SharePath RUM Express -
a free tool that provides a real-time
view into the actual experience of
your end-user, including availability,
response times and service levels.
