Effective monitoring is essential for running a successful web business. It improves business performance by accelerating response to issues and opportunities that arise from web application operations, helping your company get and keep customers, boost revenue and build brand reputation.

Regardless of their role, everyone responsible for the success of the business needs the ability to assess its status at any given point. Adopting a holistic approach to monitoring that integrates business and technology goals, and metrics provides executives, analysts and engineers with a clear picture of how the entire business is operating. It also provides invaluable data on trends and component interactions to guide planning, troubleshooting and strategy optimization. While system engineers don’t need to understand the details of marketing, they should be aware of their company’s marketing objectives and how the web applications they support contribute to, and are affected by, those objectives. Likewise, the CEO doesn’t need to know how the web applications work in the background, but should be able to correlate the importance of key operating metrics, such as email bounce rates for an e-commerce marketing business, and their impact on costs, revenue and market perception.

While almost all web businesses perform some level of monitoring, companies would benefit by adopting a broader, more sophisticated and proactive monitoring strategy. Use the approach recommended in this paper to determine the business objectives, measures and thresholds that define the success of your web application and will drive your monitoring strategy. Create a dashboard that combines this business and technical information to produce a visually impactful, holistic view of your web business performance. Review existing web applications to ensure monitoring is sufficient and used effectively. If your current sources of monitoring data are insufficient, research, acquire, learn and deploy the right set of monitoring tools to support your new guidelines. When developing new web applications, incorporate the design and construction of business and functionality monitors within the scope of the projects to focus efforts on the most important success measures and maximize the benefit of monitoring efforts once the application is deployed.

To learn more of the case for taking a broader, deeper and more coordinated approach to monitoring, read Monitoring the Big Picture: A Modern Approach for Web Application Monitoring. It provides technical and business managers a greater understanding of the role and importance of monitoring in managing their web businesses. It will illustrate how a holistic, multi-disciplinary monitoring program can solve complex issues that cross business and technical boundaries and drive real improvements in business performance.

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