Not all Internet outages take a website down. Some may impact a smaller subsection of users or only affect one part of a site’s functionality. Moreover, because of their relative “hidden” nature, organizations may not always know about them immediately since fewer users will be making complaints. However, such incidents can still have serious consequences, thus you want to detect them as soon as possible so you can quickly mitigate and resolve issues.

Dear Santa, I’ve been an extremely good IT Operations Manager this year (which is saying something considering the state of the world at the moment) and I have a few items on my wish list.

Most Internet-centric organizations today use some form of APM tools, as they should. But they are insufficient. Over the last ten years, the world has completely changed. If you think about it, in the first decade of this millennium, most businesses had an Exchange server, maybe Siebel CRM, a file share, and a range of other business apps, usually hosted in the same building. Everything was on the LAN. Today, it is the exact opposite. Everything is distributed.

We are at the cusp of an important technology transformation. A discontinuity in technology as Peter Drucker would call it (precipitated by Covid). For decades, IT organizations invested in building, managing, and monitoring LANs. Everything was on your local network: your CRM, your Exchange email, the file shares, and the print server. Today, many companies are shutting down their “old legacy network” and are running their enterprise without a LAN, WAN, or an OnPrem datacenter.

Metrics, metrics everywhere... a gauge here, a counter there... milliseconds, percentages... a list of variables running into pages... what is fast, what is slow...? how on earth is one to know...? Today we have all manner of variables around us, of differing gravity, that each have their own individual purpose in the measurement of web performance. Some of these are atomic or independent metrics, whereas others are aggregated or dependent.