How constant monitoring can prevent holiday performance problems
Christmas is just six weeks off, and retailers’ hopes for happy holidays online could backfire if systems aren’t equipped to handle heavy traffic in a shorter-than-usual shopping season, says Dan Koloski, product manager at web application testing and monitoring provider Empirix Inc.
"Companies that don`t prepare well for the holidays are likely to find out the hard way that there are problems with their web sites. We’ve all heard horror stories about retailers who lost out on holiday traffic over botched e-commerce sites," says Koloski.
Koloski says five critical testing tips can help make or break online performance during peak shopping time. First, retailers should prepare by determining now where common performance bottlenecks occur, so they know what to prioritize, he says. Second, retailers should test the most common transactions first, such as search, then check the most critical transactions, such as payment. “Retailers’ success hinges on these transactions working,” says Koloski.
Third, they should create reuseable test scripts to test transactions against common bottlenecks, saving time in future tests and ongoing performance monitoring. Fourth, retailers should make sure to track issues through to their resolution to ensure that problems don’t fall through the cracks, he adds, while using the same scripts to monitor applications on an ongoing basis after they are live will help ensure that everything keeps working at top levels. Finally, he says: “Keep on top of problems that can occur at any time with automated monitoring tools. You shouldn`t be alerted to problems by your customers.”
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