Hi, Welcome to the Performance Monitoring blog! This blog is geared towards performance issues related to web based applications. The reason Monitoring appears in the title is because I work at a San Diego based company (Webmetrics) that provides services and products that perform external monitoring of web applications and therefore a lot of my experience and knowledge comes from this background. My goal is to educate developers, IT folks, and Business folks on the merits of performance monitoring and why it’s critical to today’s web applications. Discussions on performance monitoring will generally have a slant towards: Their impact on business or the impact that web technologies have on performance.
Just a bit about myself, I started at Webmetrics as an intern while attending UCSD in 2005. After graduating I became a full-time Software Engineer with Webmetrics but quickly became isolated from the goals I was trying to achieve with the software I was developing. I had no insight into how customers were actually using the product (part of this had to do with the fact that there was no Sales Engineer at Webmetrics at that time). I was approached to fill the void of the Sales Engineer position and didn’t think twice about it (though it was extremely hard at first), finally feeling that I was now on the front lines and able to learn more about performance monitoring then I ever could have as a developer.
Seeing that this discussion is about performance monitoring I figured a first good step would be to setup external monitoring for this blog. I setup a Webmetrics (www.webmetrics.com) monitoring service which will access my blog every 5 minutes from an external location (US locations only). The monitoring service is composed of a network of worldwide monitoring agents (servers) that will open an IE7 browser and navigate to perfmonblog.wordpress.com verifying both the content on the page and the performance (load time and availability) of the page. So far it’s looking pretty good (even though I don’t have a lot of content yet), the metrics for today are:
- Average load time is 1.70 seconds.
- Availability (uptime) is 100%.
