Silverlight Monitoring with Rich Internet Application Monitoring

A challenge for monitoring Silverlight is creating browser-driven monitoring scripts that mimic end user actions that won’t break due to the dynamic nature of Silverlight. In fact, many advanced monitoring solutions that use browsers won’t succeed in running a monitoring script through a rich interactive Silverlight application. In order to monitor Silverlight (or any RIA) an additional level of technical sophistication – beyond only a browser-driven monitoring script – is often needed.

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Online Banking Outage: Wells Fargo down

Dotcom-Monitor is tracking a Wells Fargo down website based on a consistent failure to connect host issues that began at approximately April 4, 12 PM CST. Dotcom-Monitor has been tracking a history of banking website outages for several months and has provided analysis of banking outages for the financial industry for issues involving recent PNC bank outages, U.S. Bancorp outages, and a previous Wells Fargo outages.

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Achieve Real Flash Monitoring to Ensure Web Performance

Flash Monitoring for Web Performance – Adobe Flash has played an important role in making the Internet a more engaging, interactive place. It serves as one of the preeminent Web 2.0 Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) by allowing enterprises to deliver a high quality on-line experience. Web designers use Flash to incorporate active and interactive content like video and animations. Flash continues to be important driver behind appealing web content and unique user experiences.

However, properly monitoring Flash to ensure users have a consistently compelling user experience, presents a challenge.

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Getting to the Core of Website Uptime – Part 1

Website Uptime isn’t a Condition, it’s a Calculation

Central to service level agreement (SLA) reports is the concept of website “uptime.” However, what exactly is uptime? Website uptime, in the recent past was often narrowly defined as the working vs. non-working condition of a web server, ie web server uptime. More recently, we have worked with many organizations that are carefully defining the details of website uptime vs. downtime, by taking into account variables like network uptime, server uptime, web application uptime, or website uptime, has become critical.

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How Social Media Makes Websites Anti-Social | Features vs Performance

For most online businesses, integrating social media into their website has enabled them to interact with their customers directly. Social media widgets offer customers the ability to have real-time engagement with the business, its products, and like-minded consumers.

Today’s DevOps are increasingly saddled with third party social media widgets (or applications). By relying on external content, developers become dependent on the quality of that third-party content delivery, which, in turn, impacts the performance of their website. Due to lack of third-party element control, developers find difficulty monitoring vital statistics related to network health.

Developers can use externally-based web performance tools to determine if their social media app integration is worth the wait.

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Improving Your Website’s Video Streaming | Monitoring Streaming Video

Internet browsing habits are increasingly visual and video content has taken off in a big way. In fact, Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast predicts over 90 percent of all content on the Net will soon be in some form of video. Cisco also notes the incremental growth in Internet traffic between 2014 and 2015 at 17.2 exabytes per month. As a result of this growth in visual browsing habits, video has become a key component of content strategy.

There are significant challenges when creating quality video experiences and effective video streaming is dependent on several independent functions within a larger system. Broadly speaking, these independent functions include: compression technology, availability of bandwidth, and network infrastructure. If any single component within the system performs poorly, user experience of video streaming can be negatively impacted.

To ensure an optimized user experience involving video streaming, website administrators should implement streaming video monitoring.

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Website Monitoring: Improve Customer Conversion and Retention

If your business relies upon e-commerce or online marketing channels to attract customers, it is important that you consider the impact poor website performance can have on your business. At a recent Velocity Conference, Eric Schurman (Microsoft) and Jake Brutlag (Google) presented; “Users who experience a 2-second site slowdown make almost 2% fewer queries, click 3.75% less often, and report being significantly less satisfied with their overall experience.”

With both revenue and customer satisfaction on the line, monitoring the performance, availability and effectiveness of your website is critical. Manually-based website monitoring is not an option. It’s costly, time-intensive, and inconsistent.

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DNS Monitoring Improves Web Site Speed and Reliability – Part 2

Dotcom-Monitor uses a non-cache DNS monitoring solution with high frequency monitoring that propagates DNS queries to the root name servers. That means a DNS issue will be identified quickly, as opposed to being masked for days as it might be with a cached monitoring approach. When monitored properly, using a non-cache method, an error is quickly identified so the designated workaround, like a DNS failover, can be implemented.

Dotcom-Monitor non-cached DNS monitoring (unlike some other cache-based DNS monitoring solutions) also provides diagnostics with an automated trace-route as soon as a DNS problem is detected. This means less time investigating the problem and much faster mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). The Dotcom-Monitor DNS monitoring solution also allows website owners to spot trends so that small DNS issues can be addressed before they become big DNS problems.

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