Ryan Arsenault
Black Friday is one of the biggest — if not the biggest — online retail days of the year in the United States with deals abound. It’s a day when it’s just as likely for you to get a 404 Error when navigating to an e-commerce site as it is to fill up your cart with those Dr. Dre Beats headphones on the cheap.
But performance issues aren’t unique to retail by any stretch — in fact, just last month, The New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines and The Wall Street Journal all experienced some major performance events of their own. Not exactly mom-and-pop brand names, and not exactly a pattern of industries. In other words, web performance doesn’t discriminate.
And now, we’ve graduated to the point of Internet maturity where a 5-second load time (that you wouldn’t think twice about in the 1998 AOL era) is an eternity — an annoyance on par with that 404 Error you experienced on Black Friday. Sure, it may sound like a petty case of some #FirstWorldProblems, but in the online world for a company’s Internet presence and a site taking >3 seconds to load — your site may as well be down.
In fact, in a lively webinar last week co-driven by Aberdeen Group Senior Research Analyst, IT, Jim Rapoza, and Michael Kane, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Dyn, Kane made the bold claim that “slow is the new downtime.”
IT managers can relate — five seconds of the ‘spinning wheel of death’ can lead to 500 helpdesk tickets in a matter of minutes.
Troubleshooting in the Dark
The problem for a lot of IT managers with these performance issues and downtime isn’t necessarily their site host provider’s problem — 9 times out of 10 it’s an internal problem stemming from blindly troubleshooting. In fact, according to Aberdeen Group research on the top Internet performance challenges faced by businesses today, 46% of organizations lack tools to monitor web application performance while 21% lack visibility into Internet performance.
An End-to-End Approach
Best-In-Class organizations are solving these challenges — blind spots in what is affecting web performance — by taking an end-to-end approach to performance monitoring and management, before these problems even reach the end-user.
This means all of the tools are there to see that no route, path, or Internet connection goes unnoticed when they aren’t performing up to par. And this adoption of the approach is not happening in small numbers — in fact, a whopping 91% of Best-In-Class organizations surveyed have already, or plan to, implement an end-to-end approach in their organization.
Some of the benefits these companies are seeing as a result of end-to-end monitoring are found in the following data from Aberdeen:
With all of these benefits of an end-to-end approach, remember how they’ll proactively aid you in your approach to performance monitoring when 5 seconds to your site’s users basically means your site is as good as dead.
In 2015, slow is the new downtime.
If you weren’t able to make the live webinar about online performance last week, have no fear — the full session of Building a Valuable Presence Through Online Performance is available on-demand.
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