It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is
It was so great that you at least got notified that your website was experiencing “downtime” on Black Friday 2012. Until you realized that “downtime” or “up” is all of the outage message you got from your current basic monitoring service. You had no idea of what the outage “downtime” really meant. Or where the downtime was! Unfortunately when you got that “downtime” notification by SMS on Cyber Monday at 1 am. EST the monitoring service that you used didn’t provide an automatic diagnostic network trace route, nor a snapshot of the website at the time of the outage error. As a result, as the clock ticked your European buyers abandoned shopping carts while you were doing troubleshooting. Your time-to-repair pushed past Inga’s patience in Norway as she paused over her shopping cart on your website wondering if it would ever refresh, until finally, reluctantly, she said “farvel” to your Cyber Monday special blue sweater – probably forever.
Blunders of Websites Past
Look, every online retail season has winners and losers and everybody has surprises. If you can minimize the impact of the surprises on your website by taking precautionary steps before the make-or-break days of your online retail season you’re certain to be better prepared. Get a monitoring service that captures trace route diagnostics for downtime and outages. And lets dream a little here…won’t it be cool if a monitoring service took a video of the error and you could play it back so you could see what your user’s experienced? Website monitoring with video capture of errors…so 2013 sounding, isn’t it? Prior. Proper. Planning. Or, you can fly by the seat of your pants and wonder why things went so sideways on Black Friday 2012 and Cyber Monday 2012. Lets imagine that you’ve got a chance, like Micheal J. Fox as Marty McFly in the movie Back to the Future, to see the problems before they occur. And you’ve got a 5-minutes chance to set things right, to run a few instant, free tests to ensure your own versions of a “flux capacitor” works for your Black Friday 2012 online retail season, the Black Friday 2013 online retail season and …beyond.
Just land on Stopping Black Friday Outages, Before They Start – Part 3 – Downtime?
Read the other entries in this series, Stopping Black Friday Outages, Before They Start – Part 1 – Web Apps – & – Stopping Black Friday Outages, Before They Start – Part 2 – DNS & HTML.
