Multi-Step Web Transaction Performance Monitoring

In 2010, AlertFox introduced the ability to monitor a multi-step web “transaction” and it’s overall performance from start-to-finish.

Today, we are please to say we have heard your requests and we are delivering with more granularity. Now, we can monitor and provide historical performance data for each, individual step within the transaction.

Multi-Step Sub-task Monitoring: The Core Idea

Display information about sub-tasks’ runtimes in addition to the macro runtime total.

This allows for “splitting” the complete runtime of a measurement macro into information about the runtimes of its sub-tasks. A shopping cart/checkout process test transaction may e.g. display

• time for completing the login process

• time for searching for the article

• time for adding the article to a virtual shopping cart

• time for processing the checkout/payment process

• total run time

Example Use Cases

• Alice’s macro buys four articles in an online store.
  She wants to receive a notification if adding one of them takes longer than 20 seconds.

• Bob is a web developer and wants to see whether his new code slowed down the credit card payment in an online shopping session.

• Ceilia wants to have the web admins informed if the login page does not show up.
  In case the login fails, she then wants to have the DB team informed

• Eric wants to compare two LAMP stacks that host the same HTML and DB data but are configured differently. He wants to know which parts of a typical browser session are negatively affected by the different configurations.

• Frieda is concerned about the responsiveness of her web site once a user is logged in

How to do it?

You can enhance all your existing and new transaction sensors with the multi-step reporting capability with just one simple step.

1. Distinguish the measurable steps of your transaction with the command:

STOPWATCH LABEL=”your label for this sub task”.

2. That is it!

Now the detailed timing of all key section of your transaction becomes transparent:

For more information please see http://wiki.alertfox.com/Reporting#Multi-Step_Performance

For any questions, please contact our tech support at support@alertfox.com