Automation Solution for Website User Experience Checks

With the number of people searching a company’s digital profile before engaging with them rising dramatically and the massive uptake of online shopping, the need for a high quality and quick loading webpage is becoming increasingly more important.

The reliability and responsiveness of the website is critical to gaining and retaining customers. With recent research showing that 40% of web traffic will drop off a site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds, the potential for lost revenue is astronomical and the damage to your company brand as a whole is intangible. To get around this, many web developers and marketers put a lot of time and effort into optimizing a company’s digital presence, using a complex set of different tools and site plug ins to try gauge the best user experience, often creating more problems than they can solve. The challenge for any IT team is monitoring the status and performance of their web estate.

There are external webpage monitoring solutions available, but they come with their own limitations;

• They require complex technical setup
• Must be configured per URL to be checked
• Are conducted using synthetic probes so don’t reflect real browser performance nor do they detect
specific browser issues
• Tests are typically performed from the internet so don’t reflect the performance your staff will see when
accessing intranet sites

The Web Page Checker solution from Kelverion streamlines this process and takes the monitoring of your web sites and resources to the next level using a simple and flexible approach to gathering Key Performance metrics. The checks are true end-user experience checks using our Web Automation Robotic module to open the web pages using a real browser, executing from one or many locations using either machines deployed in the cloud, or on premises.

The solution leverages the Kelverion Runbook Suite to unite the following components;

• Kelverion Runbook Studio
• Kelverion Automation Portal
• Kelverion Integration Module for Web Automation
• Microsoft Azure Automation
• Microsoft Azure Log Analytics

These combine to build a straightforward framework to enable web page monitoring which offers many benefits over other solutions;

• The solution is configured via the Automation portal which allows the monitoring targets to be defined
easily by non-technical users.
• The solution can be configured to run in “full discovery” mode whereby it will start with the web page you select and then visit each of the pages linked to it recursively. Using easily configurable black list and white list patterns you can control the scope of discovery and allow the solution to monitor as many or as few pages as required.
• Synthetic transactions are executed from within a standard web browser giving true end user perspective
• Tests can be performed both from in the cloud or on premise allowing for true intranet testing

The results of those transactions are measured, and the data pushed into Microsoft Log Analytics. The KPI data can then be consolidated with multiple other data sources to provide a holistic view of web page health and performance. Allowing you to; pre-empt impacting issues, raise Incidents when web performance issues are detected, build more intelligence in the scaling of your web sites, or to provide intelligent Auto scaling of your applications where and when your users need it most! One of the greatest benefits of running such a solution on Azure, is you can easily benefit from Azures distributed nature, if you want to monitor the users experience from Northern Europe or South America you can. You can simulate those user transactions from anywhere there is an Azure datacentre.

By utilising the full power of the Integration Module for Web Automation the solution can be used to carry out Web Application Checks. The Integration Module can undertake complex interactions with your web application like; login, browse pages, submit queries, fill in forms. This means it can measure not just webpage performance but the end to end performance of a Web Application as experienced by a real User.