About a year ago my friends and I were scouring the web for cheap weekend packages to Vegas. We found a great deal at Vegas.com that came out to ~$200 each for flight and 2 nights stay, right on the strip. It seemed too good to be true, and it was, because when each time we clicked the Purchase button, it stalled. We tried several times until midnight at which point the price rose by $100. We ended up buying a package on Expedia, whose payment application worked fine.

This is an example of how millions of dollars in sales are lost each day to web application errors. When applications like travel-planners and shopping carts malfunction, they not only hurt sales figures but also tarnish a brand’s reputation. That’s why transaction monitoring is such a valuable investment for e-commerce companies. We’ve made a new video tutorial to show you how easy it is to get started.

Our Transaction Recorder is a Firefox plug-in that records your actions in Firefox. Simply go through the business-critical steps of your web application and watch as the recorder generates a script with commands like click, type, etc. You can manually enter commands to pause, wait for text, or wait for elements. Once the script is complete, you can save it and add it to your dashboard. We will show you how long each step takes to execute, and if there’s an error, we’ll show you a screen capture of the browser and a detailed view of all the objects in the faulty webpage.

Starting this week Monitis is rolling out new video tutorials that will guide users through setting up each type of monitor. The videos are located under the Resources tab of our homepage.  One of the videos is for Full Page Load monitoring, which has been a huge hit since we added it to our services a few weeks ago. It allows users to analyze how objects in their webpage are loading in real browsers in different parts of the world and identify bottlenecks. This is an extremely important measure for understanding user experience, as studies have shown that even a slight lag in load time can cause a noticeable drop in viewership and sales. As the video highlights, Amazon.com discovered that a 100 ms increase in load time resulted in a 1% drop in sales.  One might consider 100ms an unnoticeable duration, but 1% of Amazon’s annual sales is a whopping $300 million! Load time is also one of the parameters used by Google in determining a website’s PageRank.

Adding Full Page Load monitors is very easy.  Simply go to Add Monitor>Full Page Load, enter the url, a name and tagname for your monitor, a timeout threshold, frequency in minutes, and the locations from which to monitor. Click add and it will be added to the dashboard instantly. You can edit settings and add notification rules by click the pencil icon at the top. Clicking a datapoint reveals how the objects loaded during a particular test.  Objects include CSS scripts, Javascript, individual images, RSS, redirects, Frames and iFrames. The load times of these components are shown in a graphical view sometimes called a waterfall, and also in a sortable table. For each object, Monitis lists the following quantities: HTTP Response Code, Total Download time, DNS, Connection, 1st byte, Content Download, and number of bytes.  Sorting these quanities allows the user to quickly identify bottlenecks in the webpage. For example, sorting the DNS column brings the objects with the longest DNS time to the top.

One of our users, a large online news service, found that the website was loading fast save for a couple banner ads that were taking longer than 30 seconds to load. A customer in the education space found that pictures were taking too long to load and needed to be compressed or switched to .png files.

So, below is the video for your viewing pleasure. And if you’d like pricing details check out our Plan Builder. Full Page Load monitoring starts at just $5/month for the same plan that some of our competitors charge $50/month for!

Louisiana State University (LSU) has a great story to tell about using the cloud to build a state of the art course management system (CMS), and it is an effort involving teachers, students and administration.

The school realized that it needed to consolidate two CMSs that they were using, one a Blackboard-based system and the other internally created and managed, in order to gain maximum efficiency and sustainability. In order to be sustainable, the CMS had to consider:

- The software development cycle
- The resources necessary to finance and maintain the CMS during this lifecycle
- The ability to evolve the CMS to meet ever-changing demands
- The ease of feature development during the lifecycle

After a lengthy review of systems in the marketplace, LSU picked the open-source tool Moodle, hosted by vendor Moodlerooms. The school picked Moodle for its sustainability, flexibility for customization, as well as its interoperability, allowing LSU’s IT staff to tie the application directly into legacy systems.

Only a year after its adoption and the conversion of 5,000 courses into Moodle, LSU saw dramatic increases in CMS usage (140% increase), training and support usage (including a 40% increase in instructor participation) — and all within its previous budget.  What’s more, LSU has been able to continually tweak its CMS, due to the open-source nature of Moodle.

One thing I’d advise LSU to do, however, is to keep a close eye on its hosted CMS. Whether we’re talking about Moodle or Blackboard or any other system, it’s crucial to make sure that the system is up and running smoothly for your students, faculty and staff to access. Monitoring services, such as Monitis, can provide load testing services and valuable, timely notifications to warn you when a system or app is down.