How Website Monitoring Saved an Online Auto Parts Retailer
CASE STUDY: How Website Monitoring Saved an Online Auto Parts
Retailer
PROBLEM: Customers complaining about site outages and
slow site response times. Hosting company claiming that the
problems had been resolved. Customers remaining dissatisfied.
METHODOLOGY: External website monitoring on a
page-by-page basis at one-minute intervals pinpointed the
problems.
SOLUTIONS: Realigning shared hosting, fixing database
indexing, DNS server upgrade, altering the web host's BGP
configuration and regular website monitoring.
THE STORY: Once seen as an alternative marketing
channel, online shopping has carved its own niche in the
marketplace. The online shopping sector has grown rapidly,
outstripping other sectors and opening new business prospects.
The factors contributing to the continuous growth of online
shopping include wider product ranges, convenience, lower
prices, and availability of clear product information. Recent
large investments in e-commerce by companies large and small
have further energized the sector and strengthened its roots.
This growth has not come easy. Although most shopping sites feel
that they have rid themselves of persistent growing pains, some
remain. A recent Andersen Consulting Services survey reveals that more
than 25 percent of online shopping experiences fail during
holiday seasons due to site outages. Another
survey by the NDP Group reveals that up to 23 percent of
online shoppers still experience temporary website outages, late
shipments, and customer service issues.
Dotcom-Monitor website
and network monitoring specializes in ensuring performance
and uptime in online transaction processes, including shopping
carts, sign-ins, and form submission. By simulating end-use
actions, Dotcom-Monitor.com verifies each step within a
transaction, not only for proper content, but also for requested
performance. If any test parameters fall outside of the
specified range, responsible personnel are immediately notified.
One of Dotcom-Monitor's recent customers, a large online auto
parts retailer, approached Dotcom-Monitor with concern about
website performance issues. Even after aggressive marketing
campaigns, this retailer of name brand parts was still noticing
a decline in their online business. Customers persistently
complained about site outages and slow site response times.
Despite repeated complaints by the IT department to the ASP
provider and reassurances from the hosting company that the
problems had been resolved, customers remained dissatisfied.
Realizing a potential disaster for their online business, the IT
department sought a third-party external monitoring service
provider to monitor their e-commerce site 24/7 and identify the
issues and dependencies that were causing website outages.
After one-minute monitoring each day for 7 days, the following
issues were identified:
1. Slow Website Response Dotcom-Monitor's "report by
hour" feature discovered quickly the issues causing poor
performance. The collected one-minute performance data was
aggregated on an hourly basis into a single weekly report. This
report provided summary statistics about transaction by hour.
Information such as average response time (in seconds), required
time to access the website, and the number of successes and
failures, provided a clear picture about site performance during
different daily intervals. Using Dotcom Monitor's proprietary
algorithm, it was possible to calculate the site's slow response
periods. Dotcom-Monitor found that, although the e commerce site
was hosted on a dedicated shared server, during certain times in
a day, other applications on the server consumed most of its
resources. This led to slow site response. This happened only
during certain hours, as the conflicting application was run
only a few times a day.
2. Slow Web Page Response The retailer's IT department
also discovered that several pages within a transaction, such as
shipping history and "Invoice printout" were extremely slow.
They took a long time to load, causing shoppers to abandon the
site and instead call customer service. Unfortunately, the other
pages within the same transaction were extremely fast to load.
Dues to this discrepancy within the network, Dotcom-Monitor was
able to identify the specific online pages that were slow and
traced the problem to the database table that those pages were
accessing. Once proper indexing was performed, the issue was
resolved.
3. Problem in Accessing the Website During certain
intervals in a day, the retailer's site became unaccessible
altogether. A number of services, such as mail servers,
websites, and proxy servers, would become unavailable to the
online world. To make matters worse, the ISP could not find any
issues, but customers were still complaining. After a "ping pong
game" to determine the problems between the ISP and customers,
Dotcom Monitor enables its "DNS Monitoring." Dotcom-Monitor
tested the retailer's DNS servers by querying specified servers
performing "IP resolution". Every minute, website monitoring
showed that one DNS server was occasionally unable to resolve
the address. This implied that the DNS server supporting the
organization was not working consistently. The retailer upgraded
the DNS server and the problem was resolved.
4. Varying Website Response from Different Geographical
Locations Persistent monitoring showed that this retailer's
shopping cart website responded at varying speeds from different
locations. Some customers complained that the site took too long
to open, while others had no issues. Using Dotcom-Monitor's
"Report by Location" feature, which gathers data from multiple
remote agents at different locations, a traceroute snapshot was
recorded. This report was accompanied by the error message from
every location where slowdown was detected. After analyzing the
data, it was found that the ISP hosting the site used several
providers that did not peer properly with certain networks. This
network peering problem was identified and brought to the ISP.
They took the necessary actions to resolve the problem by
altering their BGP configuration.
5. Website Downtime required frequent monitoring The
retailer's website occasionally suffered downtime, which led to
customer dissatisfaction. The outages were mostly related to
software glitches that the customer was unable to fix in a short
period of time. These glitches usually required manual
intervention. Enter Dotcom-Monitor. The goal to reduce downtime
was to alert key personnel of any issue immediately. Once
website monitoring detected any problems with the web server,
immediate alert by phone and SMS would be sent to on-call
personnel. This decreased downtime periods from an average of 25
minutes to less than 5 minutes. In today's highly competitive
environment, customer expectations about website availability
and performance grow daily. What was once acceptable a few years
back is no longer the case today. Website monitoring features,
such as immediate alerts, detailed reports, and aggregated
statistics, help clients find and address issues, and thus
enhance the customer experience.
External website monitoring services offered by companies
like Dotcom-Monitor have helped customers explore issues and
discover otherwise elusive data required to take corrective
actions well before receiving customer complaints.
Dotcom-Monitor.com services extend into all industries. It is
important to note that website monitoring services are a must
for all mission-critical services, and are not just limited to
the current example of shopping cart customers. In industries
such as finance, insurance, medical, and manufacturing, or any
industry that requires high website uptimes and excellent
website response, it is becoming essential to employ external
website monitoring services.