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How Website Monitoring Saved An Online Auto Parts Retailer
By David Leonhardt, Fri Dec 9th

CASE STUDY: How Website Monitoring Saved an Online Auto PartsRetailer

PROBLEM: Customers complaining about site outages andslow site response times. Hosting company claiming that theproblems had been resolved. Customers remaining dissatisfied.

METHODOLOGY: External website monitoring on apage-by-page basis at one-minute intervals pinpointed theproblems.

SOLUTIONS: Realigning shared hosting, fixing databaseindexing, DNS server upgrade, altering the web host's BGPconfiguration and regular website monitoring.

THE STORY: Once seen as an alternative marketingchannel, online shopping has carved its own niche in themarketplace. The online shopping sector has grown rapidly,outstripping other sectors and opening new business prospects.The factors contributing to the continuous growth of onlineshopping include wider product ranges, convenience, lowerprices, and availability of clear product information. Recentlarge investments in e-commerce by companies large and smallhave further energized the sector and strengthened its roots.

This growth has not come easy. Although most shopping sites feelthat they have rid themselves of persistent growing pains, someremain. A recent Anothersurvey by the NDP Group reveals that up to 23 percent ofonline shoppers still experience temporary website outages, lateshipments, and customer service issues.

Dotcom-Monitor websiteand network monitoring specializes in ensuring performanceand uptime in online transaction processes, including shoppingcarts, sign-ins, and form submission. By simulating end-useactions, Dotcom-Monitor.com verifies each step within atransaction, not only for proper content, but also for requestedperformance. If any test parameters fall outside of thespecified range, responsible personnel are immediately notified.

One of Dotcom-Monitor's recent customers, a large online autoparts retailer, approached Dotcom-Monitor with concern aboutwebsite performance issues. Even after aggressive marketingcampaigns, this retailer of name brand parts was still noticinga decline in their online business. Customers persistentlycomplained about site outages and slow site response times.Despite repeated complaints by the IT department to the ASPprovider and reassurances from the hosting company that theproblems had been resolved, customers remained dissatisfied.

Realizing a potential disaster for their online business, the ITdepartment sought a third-party external monitoring serviceprovider to monitor their e-commerce site 24/7 and identify theissues and dependencies that were causing website outages.

After one-minute monitoring each day for 7 days, the followingissues were identified:

1. Slow Website Response Dotcom-Monitor's "report byhour" feature discovered quickly the issues causing poorperformance. The collected one-minute performance data wasaggregated on an hourly basis into a single weekly report. Thisreport provided summary statistics about transaction by hour.Information such as average response time (in seconds), requiredtime to access the website, and the number of successes andfailures, provided a clear picture about site performance duringdifferent daily intervals. Using Dotcom Monitor's proprietaryalgorithm, it was possible to calculate the site's slow responseperiods. Dotcom-Monitor found that, although the e commerce sitewas hosted on a dedicated shared server, during certain times ina day, other applications on the server consumed most of itsresources. This led to slow site response. This happened onlyduring certain hours, as the conflicting

application was runonly a few times a day.

2. Slow Web Page Response The retailer's IT departmentalso discovered that several pages within a transaction, such asshipping history and "Invoice printout" were extremely slow.They took a long time to load, causing shoppers to abandon thesite and instead call customer service. Unfortunately, the otherpages within the same transaction were extremely fast to load.Dues to this discrepancy within the network, Dotcom-Monitor wasable to identify the specific online pages that were slow andtraced the problem to the database table that those pages wereaccessing. Once proper indexing was performed, the issue wasresolved.

3. Problem in Accessing the Website During certainintervals in a day, the retailer's site became unaccessiblealtogether. A number of services, such as mail servers,websites, and proxy servers, would become unavailable to theonline world. To make matters worse, the ISP could not find anyissues, but customers were still complaining. After a "ping ponggame" to determine the problems between the ISP and customers,Dotcom Monitor enables its "DNS Monitoring." Dotcom-Monitortested the retailer's DNS servers by querying specified serversperforming "IP resolution". Every minute, website monitoringshowed that one DNS server was occasionally unable to resolvethe address. This implied that the DNS server supporting theorganization was not working consistently. The retailer upgradedthe DNS server and the problem was resolved.

4. Varying Website Response from Different GeographicalLocations Persistent monitoring showed that this retailer'sshopping cart website responded at varying speeds from differentlocations. Some customers complained that the site took too longto open, while others had no issues. Using Dotcom-Monitor's"Report by Location" feature, which gathers data from multipleremote agents at different locations, a traceroute snapshot wasrecorded. This report was accompanied by the error message fromevery location where slowdown was detected. After analyzing thedata, it was found that the ISP hosting the site used severalproviders that did not peer properly with certain networks. Thisnetwork peering problem was identified and brought to the ISP.They took the necessary actions to resolve the problem byaltering their BGP configuration.

5. Website Downtime required frequent monitoring Theretailer's website occasionally suffered downtime, which led tocustomer dissatisfaction. The outages were mostly related tosoftware glitches that the customer was unable to fix in a shortperiod of time. These glitches usually required manualintervention. Enter Dotcom-Monitor. The goal to reduce downtimewas to alert key personnel of any issue immediately. Oncewebsite monitoring detected any problems with the web server,immediate alert by phone and SMS would be sent to on-callpersonnel. This decreased downtime periods from an average of 25minutes to less than 5 minutes. In today's highly competitiveenvironment, customer expectations about website availabilityand performance grow daily. What was once acceptable a few yearsback is no longer the case today. Website monitoring features,such as immediate alerts, detailed reports, and aggregatedstatistics, help clients find and address issues, and thusenhance the customer experience.

External website monitoring services offered by companieslike Dotcom-Monitor have helped customers explore issues anddiscover otherwise elusive data required to take correctiveactions well before receiving customer complaints.Dotcom-Monitor.com services extend into all industries. It isimportant to note that website monitoring services are a mustfor all mission-critical services, and are not just limited tothe current example of shopping cart customers. In industriessuch as finance, insurance, medical, and manufacturing, or anyindustry that requires high website uptimes and excellentwebsite response, it is becoming essential to employ externalwebsite monitoring services.

About the author:David Leonhardt is a website monitoring services and