How Crutchfield`s SWAT team jumps on broken links
No matter how hard a retailer tries to keep on top of them, broken links happen. In fact, a recent Jupiter survey of 239 web sites found broken links on 14% of pages. Pages change, code gets corrupted and any other number of factors can trip up even the most careful web site operations. The trick is fixing broken links before they drive down sales.
Online home and auto electronics retailer Crutchfield.com has reduced by 60-90% the time it takes to fix broken links since installing a monitoring program from TeaLeaf Technologies Inc., Steve Weiskircher, director of IT systems for Crutchfield, tells Internet Retailer.
"With the monitoring system, we can receive notification of a potential problem in anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes," Weiskircher says. "We can reduce the time spent determining the cause of broken links and other performance problems because we can simply replay the problem user session. We don’t have to re-create the entire environment to determine what happened."
Using TeaLeaf technology, Crutchfield records complete HTTP requests and the response stream for real user sessions. Captured data includes everything the real-time user sees and does, as well as underlying information such as page load time, cookies, referring URLs, browser type and version, operating system, IP address, and session IDs.
By analyzing this detailed information, as well as other data compiled from event and log capture, Crutchfield can evaluate page failures and broken links against defined thresholds. This means webmasters and application specialists can re-create problems almost instantly, determine which server or database is causing trouble and take preventive or corrective action.
Previous monitoring systems worked as separate elements. But Crutchfield`s TeaLeaf monitoring system is connected to a portal that can accept information from various databases and allows users to access it on a control panel or monitoring console via a web browser. The information can be displayed in any way that the user finds most helpful.
With 3 million unique visitors to Crutchfield.com each month, the retailer used to rely on complaints relayed by customer service representatives to the web development staff before acting on problems. If a number of broken links were reported, webmasters, application developers and other technical support staff met to determine where the problem was occurring. Then they needed to adjust all problem servers or database functions--a task that could take hours to complete.
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