Top 10 DevOps issues proactively identified with Site24x7

As the summer weather heats up, we wanted to share with you the top 10 technical issues you can identify with Site24x7 before outages happen, and help desks start sizzling with overflowing issues and escalations.

1)~~ Slow Website/Web applications. Frustrated users will leave your site if it takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, while internal users will complain and vent to upper management. Rely on Site24x7 cloud-based Web monitoring services to get alerted when individual pages or multi-step transactions (e.g. logging, browse, select, add to shopping cart, enter credit card info, purchase and check-out) start to slow-down and underperform.

2)~~ Datacenter constraints. An overloaded server? A saturated application server? A slow Exchange server? Don't wait to realize that you don't have enough infrastructure capacity until it is too late and Web requests cannot be completed. Instead, with Site24x7 you can monitor key performance indicators across your databases, mail servers, web servers, application servers and load balancers, and get proactive notifications of capacity bottlenecks much early.

3)~ Mobile performance issues. Did you know that now you can use Site24x7 to turn mobile devices into monitoring locations? Get critical insight into key mobile performance metrics such as availability, response time and downtime across mobile websites and native mobile apps to truly understand the mobile experience you are delivering to your users. You can even track 3G/4G WiFi network performance across multiple service providers. Find and resolve mobile problems before your users are impacted.

~ 4)~~ Over-paying cloud providers. Since Amazon has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, you want to ensure that your cloud capacity is properly used and fine-tuned so you don’t overpay for cloud resources you don’t really need. With Site24x7 cloud monitoring,you get deep insight into the resource utilization of EC2 and RDS instances and the applications running on them so you can ensure your cloud resources are properly allocated, and your performance is top-notch.

5)~ Cloud multi-tenancy issues. When running your applications in the cloud --where you share physical servers with other companies, their Web operations can also impact your performance (e.g. “stolen CPU”). To ensure smooth operations and avoid noisy neighbors, baseline CPU usage during normal operations and peak times with Site24x7. Using a command such as ‘iostat 1’ you can measure the amount of CPU Steal your EC2 instance is experiencing.

6)~~ Geographical response time discrepancies. Sometimes Web glitches only arise for specific users and locations, or you may even have geographical response time discrepancies that should be addressed with a CDN (Content Delivery Network) provider. Configure Site24x7 to test and measure your response time from several monitoring nodes (e.g. top-revenue generation locations, key states, key countries, etc...). That way you can historically track and compare response time across locations and identify geo-discrepancies early on.

7)~~ Slow SQL queries and other code issues: With Site24x7 APM Insight application tracing capabilities, IT, DevOps and developers alike can visualize end-to-end transactions, in real-time, starting from URL all the way to back-end SQL queries, and easily drill down into faulty or slow code. You can even track Database Response Time Operation by Caller (item, inventory, category, etc.) and identify slow calls or overloaded databases.

~ 8)~~ Virtual proliferation. Creating new VMs is so quick and easy that many organizations end up with hundreds of VMs they really don’t need. Besides overpaying to create and manage these VMs, troubleshooting performance issues becomes really complex and tedious since VMWare introduces a new layer of abstraction, and you have multiple VMs deployed in a physical box. Stop troubleshooting in the dark, and use Site24x7 VMware vSphere-based discovery to automatically find and map all your VMs, and understand physical server to VM relationships on an on-going basis. You can also monitor performance across your ESX servers and VMs in real-time, and get alerted at the first sign of trouble.

~ 9)~ Web content errors, hacked content and redirects. Your Web server could promptly respond in 3-4 seconds but deliver errors to your users (a shopping cart $0 value, a "Server too busy” code, etc.).To detect errors much sooner, use Site24x7 to track that important keywords are present (or missing) in your Webpages, and define alerting policies when they are missing (or present). Additionally, you can verify your Web redirects and avoid situations like hacked Websites redirecting users to malware (as recently happened at AskMe.com and Reuters Website).

10)~~ Poor user satisfaction with your applications. With Site24x7 you can gauge end-user satisfaction with your Web apps. Site24x7 Apdex scores converts response time and throughput measurements into real insight about user satisfaction with your applications in 3 easy to understand levels: “Satisfied”, “Tolerated” or “Frustrated". A score of 1.0 is the best you can get, so if your Apdex starts to drop, it’s time to speed up your Website. In fact, if you are thinking about Web Performance Optimization here are some tips to help you get started.

What else would you add to this list? Let us know!