The performance of many of today’s websites depends on forces beyond their control. Third parties can often be the driving force behind your most important user journeys – and when they slow down or stop, it’s your sales that will suffer.

Many sites provide feeds to comparison sites, or to partners providing, for example, map inserts, traffic feeds, news feeds and other live 3rd party information. These all need to be monitored as part of an overall monitoring strategy. With web services, web APIs and mashups being an important part of transactional websites today, the performance of your XML and JSON transports can be as important as that of your ‘real’ user journeys.

Site Confidence’s monitoring solution can validate against standard XML schemas as well as delivering our usual level of reliable performance and availability data and alerting.

Site Confidence can’t transform the performance of your data centre. But we can make sure you know when an issue rears its head, meaning you can fix the error before it brings down your whole site.

Site Confidence’s web server availability monitoring solution removes the noise from the rest of the internet, getting straight to the heart of issues caused by individual or multiple web farms.

Through careful engineering we can monitor the availability and performance of every server in the cluster as well as transactional flows, enabling badly performing servers or stacks to be identified easily and repaired or removed from the mix as necessary.

As websites rapidly evolve, the performance and availability of pre-production or staging environments is important to monitor.

There’s no point putting a release live if the performance in pre-production is not up to scratch. Through manipulation of host files or helping you to engineer load balancers, Site Confidence is able to monitor most environments in addition to the live one. HTTP or NTLM Authentication, as well as IP based security methods, can enable us to gain secure access, over HTTPS if necessary, to these environments.

For example, some monitoring on your DR environment can save a lot of embarrassment in a disaster scenario!

These days, email is one of the most business critical applications of all. Slowdowns or outages for just a few moments can have a real impact. Site Confidence’s suite of email monitoring tools is a vital part of an IT Services monitoring solution:

• Email tracker: We measure the performance of the complete journey of an email, by delivering an email to your servers that is auto forwarded back to Site Confidence. We can check that all parts of the system are working and deliver the metrics that enable you to track problems. With more and more spam filters, content checkers, and virus scanners in the loop that could cause problems, this is an essential tool in the Mail Server administrator’s armoury.
• Message Monitor: Enables you to track individual messages that are generated by a variety of activities on your web site. A record is generated as soon as the message is sent and we then track how long it takes for the message to arrive. You can then choose to apply metrics for successful delivery in the form of time limits. Useful for assuring receipts or password requests and other time critical messages are delivered on time – a crucial part of the overall customer experience.
• Email server monitoring: We initiate POP, IMAP and SMTP sessions with your email servers at regular intervals to ensure they are available to your users.

This special variant of page testing performs downloads of key content once every minute. The data collected is then carefully crafted into specific reports for the purposes of reviewing any existing service level agreements or guarantees.

The independence of Site Confidence and the data we collect will be invaluable when policing service delivery with any third party, whether they are hosting or bandwidth providers, affiliates or your customers.

In addition to HTTP, our test agents also support the standard FTP protocol.

We can initiate sessions with your FTP servers at regular intervals to ensure that they are available to your users. Just like page testing we will monitor the performance of these servers, capturing connection speeds and availability.