Web Operations

The Future of Web Monitoring

End-user experience monitoring is a thriving and rapidly changing field. It's the most analyzable, quantifiable part of a business, and new technologies emerge weekly. Here are some things to consider.

Moving from Parts to Users

The stack on which the modern Web runs can be deep and hard to troubleshoot. It's not uncommon to see a web application based on virtual machines in many locations, load balanced locally and globally, and running layers upon layers of abstraction. Consider a cloud, with a VM, running Java, with a Rails implementation atop that, serving HTML and CSS. Instrumenting the stack is tough, and setting meaningful thresholds is almost impossible.

As a reaction to this complexity, many web operators start with end-user experience rather than platform health. This "top-down" approach relies on external monitoring to trap errors, extract diagnostic information, and help you pinpoint the problem from the errors themselves. You can even build a "click here to send this error to us" apology page that sends a message to your team, including suitably obfuscated diagnostic data such as which server created the page and which datacenter it came from.

Service-Centric Architectures

With RIAs built atop Flash, Silverlight, Java, and AJAX, more and more of the communication between the client and the server occurs through web services. The IT industry is gradually shifting toward the service-oriented architecture (SOA) model, in part because it allows operators ...