You’ve come a long way in your ecommerce store: your website is up and ready, the SEO has been optimized and the huge marketing campaign you have invested so much effort and money has been launched. It will be a glorious sale season…
...except no order is coming in!
And obviously no one knows why: even the simplest ecommerce platform is a huge ecosystem of integrated services and softwares that is at the same time so fragile that a single code error or a misdirected call can stop all the correct functioning.
This is why you need Application Performance Monitoring.
What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
APM is the practice of proactively monitoring the many facets of an application environment in order to identify and mitigate issues before they become major problems.
There are many softwares out there capable of managing the key metrics of your systems, but they all work in similar manners: they use “agents”, lightweight software that inject a snippet of code in you system that allows it to track activity from both users and infrastructure. The agent then sends all this data to a dedicated platform that collects, normalises and visualizes all this activity in a way that can be easily understood.
Monitoring systems can be quite extensive
They collect data from:
- The infrastructure: CPU, Memory, disk space, network of the hosts (whatever virtual or physical)
- The application: Threads, Pool, Database, Services (whatever external or internal)
- The user activity: Request, response times, errors, page views
While all this data is certainly useful there is a problem with this approach: you may have all data possible and yet not understand why things work the way they do.
We, at Orienteed, believe that this is just a small part of the full picture.
Any amount of metrics and data will not be able to give you the insights needed in order to operate your website. You need to understand the insights, put them in context and separate everything from the background noise… Also take into consideration the experience needed to change and adapt the monitoring parameters to any new release or software integration.
For this reason, our monitoring offer includes a full 24/7 team of expert support engineers, with an extensive certifications and multiple years of experience.
This is our mix: machine driven, with humans behind the wheel.
L1 Service Manager at Orienteed.
