eCommerce Web
Application at Scale
A
top concern for organizations with eCommerce Web sites, application developers and IT infrastructure managers is ensuring a successful end-user experience. It is crucial that the corporate brand does not become tarnished due to a bad user experience and that customers who visit the Web site during a big sale are not pushed away to competitors who offer a better user experience.Can you meet the volatile demand for the surge in traffic during your sale next week? What might the ramifications be if you can’t? The question is not whether or not you’ll lose business. Your business will undoubtedly be impacted. The question is how much.
The answer to meeting volatile demand due to sales surges and similar Web site activity requires a solid understanding of the baseline of your normal operations. You need a vehicle to perform end-to-end profiling in order to successfully identify and resolve emerging contention storms before they impact business. This can only be achieved with deep
analytics that provide a window into understanding performance management and capacity utilization tradeoffs.
WAIT JUST A SECOND
Yahoo has reported that a one second delay in web responsiveness resulted in a 2.8% decrease in revenue. Microsoft Bing found that a two-second slowdown in speed resulted in a 4.3% decrease in revenue. Google Search found that a 400mS delay resulted in a 0.6% decrease in searches per user. Shopzilla found that a five second increase in speed resulted in a 7-12% increase in revenue. In general, a zero to 100mS delay is perceived as immediate, 100mS to 300mS is perceptible, 300mS to one second is tolerable if feedback is provided and a delay of over one second causes disengagement.
FIRST ORDER EFFECTS
On the technical side, we take precautions such as separating the View (HTML/CSS/etc.) from the middle-tier logic and the back-end databases to ensure scalability with the proven model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern. A best practice is to put load balancers in front of the front-end Web server farm and to architect Web applications to be stateless so multiple Web servers can be used in parallel. Load balancers have advanced, and the state-of-the art now is represented by the Citrix NetScaler ADC, which is available as a physical or virtual appliance. NetScaler is used to improve the availability, scalability, end-user performance, IT infrastructure utilization and security of Web applications.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER WITH AN ADC
Because all traffic in and out of the Web application passes through one of the NetScaler ADCs, the world can be divided in half — greatly helping IT folks who look after the health of the site and the satisfaction of the site visitors. The first half is the ADC out to the visitor, and the second half is the ADC into the datacenter. The HTTP request leaves the user’s browser, passes through the ADC on its way to a Web server, then the response passes through the ADC on its way to the visitor’s browser. Because ADCs are aware of layer 4-7 information, statistics such as latency, throughput and jitter can be collected on a per-application, per-URL and per-user basis by the ADC.
INTERROGATION
The fact that the ADC collects key performance metrics as part of its function does us no good if it keeps such information hidden. There are software applications that can receive this information efficiently using the AppFlow protocol, exposed on NetScalerwhich avoids polling and thereby gains the ability to scale to support larger environments. But even this scenario is sub-optimal because the IT administrator is looking at the world through a straw. Just seeing the ADC in isolation provides only limited help in keeping an eCommerce site responsive to visitors.
ALL TOGETHER NOW
Ideally, information from the ADC can be correlated with other data sources throughout the complex IT infrastructure such as metrics from the Web servers, back-end servers, switches, databases and storage systems. With an end-to-end and application-aware perspective, IT personnel can get the most from their existing IT infrastructure while ensuring that the end- user experience is great. Because all the information is correlated in real-time, an alarm can be triggered when the latency between the ADC and the browser, or the ADC and the datacenter, exceeds a certain level.
WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON?
When an end-user is having a bad experience using an eCommerce Web site, the problem may be with their local device, browser or the networks they are using to get to the ADC. Maybe it’s an internal database that is responding slowly or perhaps there is an issue with a storage system that cannot deliver the IOPS necessary on a LUN to ensure strong Web application performance during a big sale day.
CONSIDER XANGATI
Xangati manages the performance of Web applications in a holistic way by providing visibility of hundreds or thousands of metrics across the end-to-end IT infrastructure, including latencies and throughput out to the visitors of your eCommerce site and into the greater datacenter itself. Only Xangati allows you to monitor your entire infrastructure in real time leveraging best practices, self-learned alerting and end-to-end profiling to identify and resolve contention storms.
Real-time recordings provide a baseline of your normal online operations while scheduled recordings leveraged during sales times provide deep analytics to analyze the difference to completely understand the performance management and capacity utilization tradeoffs. With its real-time dashboards, powerful recordings that are captured when a threshold is crossed, and advanced analytics that determine root cause, predict trouble and prescribe the exact steps IT personnel should take, Xangati helps you get the most from your existing IT infrastructure while ensuring a clear view and rapid remediation. With Xangati, you can have a clear end-to-end visibility into any and all Web application performance issues that may cause a visitor to become unhappy. Xangati can show you the exact cause of a user performance issue, tell you how to fix it quickly and prevent its recurrence.
CONCLUSION
The stakes are incredibly high for eCommerce sites, business Web sites and Web sites that will be used by internal personnel. Fortunately, tools are available to help you see what’s going on and optimize operations to the delight of your visitors. Xangati experts are ready to help you discover what our performance management solution can do for you. The ROI is measured in hours, so give us a call and let’s start a dialog on how Xangati can help you scale and succeed with your Web application.
LEARN MORE ON HOW TO DEPLOY AN APPLICATION-AWARE INTELLIGENT INFRASTRUCTURE
Come visit us at www.xangati.com to learn more or to download our free trial and find out how your Web applications are running today, from the visitor’s perspective.
www.xangati.com
Phone: +1 (408) 252-0505
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ABOUT XANGATI
Xangati is a leading virtualization performance monitoring and service assurance analytics innovator serving complex virtualized data centers and hybrid cloud environments. Over 400 customers among enterprises, government agencies, healthcare organizations, educational systems and cloud managed service providers trust Xangati to gain real-time insights into the performance of their virtual machines, Web applications and virtual desktop infrastructure environments, as well as underlying network, storage and compute components.
Xangati management dashboards, built on patented in-memory architecture, provide a live, continuous and interactional view into the entire IT infrastructure with predictive analytics and prescriptive remediation actions. Organizations such as Comcast, British Gas, Colliers, Harvard University and the U.S. Army, have leveraged Xangati to resolve end-user issues more quickly, optimize virtual applications, diagnose root causes of contention storms and assure overall infrastructure health. Xangati is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found at www.xangati.com.
