Complete Web Monitoring

A Complete Web Monitoring Maturity Model

As organizations improve their web visibility, they transition through several stages of maturity. You won’t achieve the same maturity across all four of the big questions at once. You may already have mature web analytics, for example, but only primitive insights into web performance.

Level 1: Technical Details

At the first level of maturity, monitoring is done for technical reasons. The organization hasn’t yet realized that the web application is important to its business strategy, and results are used only to ensure that systems are functioning and to detect egregious errors. If you’re at this level, you’re probably asking questions like:

• How many hits does my site get each day? Is that number growing?

• What percentage of HTTP GETs to the site receive an HTTP 200 OK response?

• How slowly do my servers respond to the tests I’m running?

• Does my website work on different web browsers?

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with these questions, but on their own, they don’t relate to the business because they don’t relate to a particular business objective.

Consider, for example, a server that gets a thousand requests. That traffic could all be coming from one energetic user, or it could be a thousand one-page visitors who didn’t find what they wanted. Neither is good. Or consider a server that suddenly responds slowly to a test. Unless you know how many users were on your site and what they were doing, you don’t know whether the slowdown affected your ...