Web Application Monitoring Definition

What is a Web Application?

Before we define web application monitoring, let’s start with the basics and define what a web application is: A web application is a computer program that utilizes web browsers and web technology to perform tasks over the internet.

Often web apps are customer- or employee-facing applications and are mission-critical or revenue-driving. These applications can be online shopping carts, hotel web sites, laboratory analysis systems, or even the website of France’s most popular television channel. They can be virtually any type of application from virtually any type of industry.

But like any other application, web apps can experience performance issues too. According to Enterprise Management Associates, 89% of executives say that application performance negatively impacts their business1 and 54% of IT app managers say troubleshooting application performance problems take too long.2 Web application monitoring can mitigate these problems.

What is Web Application Monitoring?

Web application monitoring provides IT with the capability to detect and diagnose web application performance issues proactively.

Web application monitoring allows IT Operations to pinpoint mission-critical web application problems quickly and resolve them before end users even notice.

How Does Web Application Monitoring Help?

Performance excellence teams are often the first line of defense for performance issues. They can often spend days trying to analyze enormous amounts data trying to track down a particularly complex issue when they don’t have the right tools.

Web application monitoring requires both page-time analysis and object-level analysis so you can understand the overall performance of the page and its individual parts. It helps to be able to group like pages together to monitor then as a whole, for example, all the pages that make up a shopping cart so you can measure the entire experience, not the piece parts.

Then there’s transaction analysis. You want it to detect abnormal web transaction performance as well as alert on common web application problems such as page errors, response per page, page rate, number of slow pages, and slow page times.

It sure would be helpful if you had analytics that revealed hidden patterns in hundreds of transactions at once by showing the individual transactions on a scatter diagram.

Of course, it goes without saying that you need to display fault information geographically on a map so you know where to focus your triage efforts. You can also view by web application, region, platform, and browser type.

Real-time SSL decryption decodes HTTPS when the customer has the key.

Why Do Web Application Monitoring?

Web application monitoring provides IT Operations teams and the web teams they support with the web application performance analysis they need to:

Minimize Downtime

• Rapidly identify and triage problems
• Ensure optimal web application performance

Improve Productivity

• Enable operational consistency
• Facilitate collaboration among IT teams and line of business

Reduce Costs

• Protect user experience and minimize impact of downtime on business
• Reduce risks and avoid costs through strategic planning