Is your website available to end users 99.8% or more of the time? If not, then count yourself in the “laggard” category, according to standards set by The Aberdeen Group, in its 2008 report “The Performance of Web Applications: Customers are Won or Lost in One Second.” In that study, laggards had web application availability only 86.3% of the time.

If 99.8% of the time seems a little unrealistic to you, consider the title of Aberdeen’s study – and that you can lose a customer in one second (to a competitor) if any part of their online experience goes sour.

You may even be thinking to yourself, ‘Do I even know what my web availability percentage is?’ If you’re a laggard or, worse, you don’t know how often your site – or some part of it – is up or down or unavailable, then it’s more important than ever to consider using website and cloud platform monitoring. It’s like having an official watchdog that barks and makes a big fuss when trouble comes.

It’s kind of hard not to notice a common set of best practices that exist when you work with IT executives everyday who use cloud services – whether they be private, hybrid or public clouds And so I thought I’d pass them on. Successful cloud users:

• Know why they’re in the cloud to begin with. Some use it for streamlining IT management, while others for handling excess storage needs. So, if you’re going to monitor your cloud use, keep these goals in mind so that you’re monitoring what’s important to you. With that information, you’ll be able to properly score your cloud provider.
• Know how their customers use the web. Successful cloud users know where their customers are located, when most of them visit, when peak traffic times occur every season, which ISPs and browser/OS combinations they use. How could this information lead to best practices? Knowing which customers are using dial-up and which are on broadband will help you address their needs.
• Always think from their customer’s viewpoint when it comes to monitoring and testing. Once they know how their customers use the web and what kind of technology they’re using. They also think from the customer viewpoint when evaluating and contracting with cloud service providers or building applications. They contract with monitoring companies to continually test an application throughout its lifetime – in order to enhance end users’ experiences, improve the apps and avoid availability problems.
• Understand what they want and need in terms of capacity. Successful cloud users want testing to ensure that capacity meets the real-world ups and downs of demand.
• Ask for guarantees based on their needs – with teeth. They demand web performance SLAs, for example, guarantees on capacity and velocity.

For more information about a variety of cloud monitoring services, visit Monitis.