Monitoring your website is not just a preemptive measure

We all know that companies invest a lot of funds and efforts to build a good image of their products and services. A rock-solid corporate identity could be a great cornerstone for gaining and increasing the public trust of your company's current and prospective clients. Once you have established a good company name, the main goal of the management is to keep that name clean and safe. And they do it, or at least try to do it the best they can. 

But what happens when your name, brand, and company identity are placed on the Web – just under the lid of a server plugged into the Internet? A place where a bunch of machines control the performance and availability of your brand name and pretty much decide your company's future. What happens when the servers you rely on stop working? Or when the end user cannot buy your product just because of a bad website performance or a broken router?

A couple of years ago, I found an article where Forrester Research published its research data regarding website performance and speed. They pointed out that if the page's loading time exceeds 2 seconds, the end users are more likely to move to another website. Keep in mind that this data was collected back in 2009. The technologies have developed a lot since then, and everything loads much faster now. With each year of technological development, the Internet speed increases, and with that - the end users' expectations go up as well. According to the results of another research by Google, only a 250ms difference in the loading time of a specific website is enough to make the end user close the tab.

Considering the above, you could conclude that the performance of your website is crucial for you and your business, and thus - monitoring your web assets is a must and not just a preemptive measure.

The monitoring tools can help not only your engineers but also the decision-makers to keep your company's reputation safe in the digital world as part of a quality online marketing strategy. This way, you achieve higher availability and improve the performance of the HTML code, jpgs, CSS frames, and any other website components.

But, as we already mentioned, the technology is developing with incredible speed, and so has the architecture of the websites. Most websites are no longer just HTML code, text content, and jpgs. It is almost impossible to surf a website today which doesn't have any scripts implemented in it. Most developers now widely use Javascript, AJAX calls, iFrames, etc. These tools provide additional functionalities to the applications but are hard to monitor with most ordinary monitoring tools. But why?

When the end user enters the desired address in the address bar of his browser and clicks "enter," the following happens:

1. The browser breaks the address to its fundamentals: scheme, host, port, user, pass, path, query, fragment
2. Then the host must be resolved
3. If no issue occurs, the browser opens a TCP connection (there is an exchange of certificates in case the connection is secured)
4. Once the connection is established, the browser sends a request to the server, as the request depends on the type of the protocol (request header)
5. Then the browser receives a reply from the server split into two – response header and content.
6. As soon as the browser gets the content starts visualizing it (the visualization includes re-creating the content as any of the implemented scripts requirements are observed accordingly.)

The good news is that all these steps are executed in the blink of an eye, and the end user gets the results as soon as the page is completely loaded. However, the implemented scripts in the content are impossible to monitor with the standard monitoring tools because, in their essence, the traditional monitoring tools are scripts programmed to execute the steps above without having the possibility to visualize the received from the server content. Why? Simply because they do not have an engine (as the browser has) to de-compile the received content.

All this should not make you think that the traditional monitoring tools are ineffective. Of course, they are. It just depends on what you are using them for.

And when the situation requires monitoring a website full of scripts, the best solution is In-browser monitoring.