There must be heads rolling at Toys R Us – that is, IT heads.

On Friday, December 11th, the mammoth toy retailer’s UK site went down for a brief period (about one hour). Think of it, 14 days before Christmas, perhaps the most popular place to buy toys for your kids, goes down. Not good for business – especially these days.

In a story I read about the crash of the Toys R Us site, a spokesperson for the company said the retailer was investigating what happened.

Shoppers logging on saw this message:

I wonder how many proceeded directly to one of the company’s competitors? Given the famously short attention span of today’s website users, I think it’s highly likely they just Googled “toys” and immediately clicked on one of the many results.

In the story, the Toys R Us spokesperson said that the down period was not due to the site being unable to handle the traffic. And the site was back up after 60 minutes.

Yet, this whole episode, as brief as it was, highlights the critical need for companies doing business on the web to adopt event and transaction monitoring as a safeguard. Not only is it important for dealing with spikes in traffic all year round, but it’s crucial for times like Christmas when literally most of the world with web access is doing at least some of its shopping online.

If you’re a website business owner, you want to enlist the services of a monitoring company that not only checks up- and down-time, but also tracks visitor activity with:

Real time website visitors tracking

Comprehensive statistics: unique visitors, page views, referrers, browsers, OS, geography

Customizable dashboard views

You also want a comprehensive, highly scalable solution that is web-based and has the bandwidth and performance management capability to give you broad visibility.

Your monitoring service should also be able to do its job from anywhere in the world from the cloud, as well as send you instant alerts about incidents – or issues that may put your site in danger of going down.

If you’re a website owner, can you afford a Toys R Us scenario? Do yourself a favor, investigate and invest in a good monitoring service.