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7 Steps to Comprehensive Monitoring for Web Performance

Dirk Paessler

Many companies are dependent on a high-performing, available website to conduct business. Whether it's an online store, a landing page for customer acquisition or online support, web performance is critical to business success. Downtime means lost dollars, and long-term problems can put the business at serious risk. Some estimates have put the cost of downtime and outages into the hundreds of billions per year.

IT departments often try to protect against downtime by focusing on the web application. Monitoring web application's performance helps identify malfunctions and their cause on a code level, so that the DevOps team can solve the problem. But, monitoring application performance only protects against application errors and ignores external factors such as network traffic, hardware, connectivity issues or bandwidth usage, all of which can have an impact performance and availability of a website.

When website performance is poor, any individual component can be responsible. Worse, the search for the root cause can be time consuming and difficult. The best way for IT departments to approach this specific problem, therefore, is not to focus on which point solutions solve specific problems, but to engage in preventative maintenance of all systems. If the systems administrator constantly monitors all of the components involved in a website process, they can baseline normal patterns and set ranges that alert to anomalous behavior.

Collecting that type of data is extremely useful in anticipating issues and identifying them before they become problems. The main goal for IT in this instance is not to establish efficient backup and recovery processes, but instead, to prevent the types of issues that lead to failures and outages altogether. Additionally, over time administrators can optimize systems and process based on historical data, which only increases the resiliency of the website and enhances overall performance.

Administrators looking to monitor website health performance in a more holistic way need to find a solution that can comprehensively monitor all aspects of the IT environment. To monitor the website end-to-end, IT would have to take the following steps:

1. Website monitoring via ping

2. Monitoring page load times

3. Web server monitoring (Microsoft Internet Information Services IIS, Apache, nginx)

4. Transaction monitoring

5. Out-of-box monitoring of common devices and applications, such as servers, switches, routers, databases and firewalls

6. Support of standard protocols for monitoring data streams such as SNMP, NetFlow and Packet Sniffing

7. Monitor virtual applications

If an administrator can put in place a comprehensive monitoring strategy that can track every aspect of the website process, they will be able to identify issues before they become problems, decrease downtime, and protect a mission-critical business process.

Dirk Paessler is CEO and Founder of Paessler AG.

APM

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Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

7 Steps to Comprehensive Monitoring for Web Performance

Dirk Paessler

Many companies are dependent on a high-performing, available website to conduct business. Whether it's an online store, a landing page for customer acquisition or online support, web performance is critical to business success. Downtime means lost dollars, and long-term problems can put the business at serious risk. Some estimates have put the cost of downtime and outages into the hundreds of billions per year.

IT departments often try to protect against downtime by focusing on the web application. Monitoring web application's performance helps identify malfunctions and their cause on a code level, so that the DevOps team can solve the problem. But, monitoring application performance only protects against application errors and ignores external factors such as network traffic, hardware, connectivity issues or bandwidth usage, all of which can have an impact performance and availability of a website.

When website performance is poor, any individual component can be responsible. Worse, the search for the root cause can be time consuming and difficult. The best way for IT departments to approach this specific problem, therefore, is not to focus on which point solutions solve specific problems, but to engage in preventative maintenance of all systems. If the systems administrator constantly monitors all of the components involved in a website process, they can baseline normal patterns and set ranges that alert to anomalous behavior.

Collecting that type of data is extremely useful in anticipating issues and identifying them before they become problems. The main goal for IT in this instance is not to establish efficient backup and recovery processes, but instead, to prevent the types of issues that lead to failures and outages altogether. Additionally, over time administrators can optimize systems and process based on historical data, which only increases the resiliency of the website and enhances overall performance.

Administrators looking to monitor website health performance in a more holistic way need to find a solution that can comprehensively monitor all aspects of the IT environment. To monitor the website end-to-end, IT would have to take the following steps:

1. Website monitoring via ping

2. Monitoring page load times

3. Web server monitoring (Microsoft Internet Information Services IIS, Apache, nginx)

4. Transaction monitoring

5. Out-of-box monitoring of common devices and applications, such as servers, switches, routers, databases and firewalls

6. Support of standard protocols for monitoring data streams such as SNMP, NetFlow and Packet Sniffing

7. Monitor virtual applications

If an administrator can put in place a comprehensive monitoring strategy that can track every aspect of the website process, they will be able to identify issues before they become problems, decrease downtime, and protect a mission-critical business process.

Dirk Paessler is CEO and Founder of Paessler AG.

APM

Hot Topics

The Latest

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Image
Cisco

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...