We once asked whether it was possible to remain both incompetent and in business. We concluded that while incompetency is not a desirable trait, it is surprisingly possible to remain in business for a fairly short while. What we have learned in Q3 is that complacency allows internet downtime to fester. Our Destimate for Q3 of 2020 is fairly high. We expect the average business with monitoring and minimal IT resources stand to lose 17.4% of revenue on the conservative side, and as much as 22.35%.

It was a dark and stormy night. Not really, of course; it was warm and pleasantly mild (the weather never seems to co-operate on these occasions), but indulge me by imagining appropriate meteorological conditions for the spine-tingling story I’m about to relate. It was Morgan’s very first night on call, and they were a mite nervous, as you can imagine.

Migrations carry a setup cost and engineers don’t work for free. Even under the most ideal conditions, it’s possible moving data between web monitoring providers will result in some missing feature or differing functionality. That’s just life. If you’re facing a migration you sometimes have to make do with the cards you’re dealt. But it’s not all doom and gloom! We hope this checklist will help you play like you’ve got pocket aces.

If there’s no customer, there’s no job. In a competitive marketplace, every site element matters from the functionality of your service to your UI; your documentation to your marketing. Your SLA should mirror that structure. Building a strong customer experience is about consistency on every level. The key is visibility, offering all the verification your customers need with an intuitive click of the mouse.

A hosted status page gives you the peace of mind that users can always answer one simple question: is it up or down. Hosted status pages work because they offer third-party confirmation your services are up. If your site goes down, the third party is likely not down and you can use them to refer to your status. Status pages are your personal 24 hour news cycle. Regardless of if you’re up or down, customer service fields fewer support tickets, and users praise your transparency.

A website performance audit is a full analysis of your marketing, usability, and search ranking. Audits are no sunny afternoon picnic. For your team, the task may be equivalent to getting sound-blasted with unexpected microphone feedback. Like feedback, a positive gain loop between a microphone and a loudspeaker, building up your site’s SEO with content, keywords, and ads increases your visibility to your audience.

There’s an old proverb; an inch of time is an inch of gold but you can’t buy that inch of time with an inch of gold. In the landscape of ecommerce we hold true to that proverb, and though you can’t purchase uptime outright, you can guard it with website monitoring. Time equals money but the value of convenience should also be considered. When ease of use returns profits, speed and functionality become primary resources. How can website monitoring improve your user experience?

Pop quiz, hotshot. How much does it cost to build a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster? Quick, no conferring. If you thought the answer was “nothing”, go to the back of the class. According to distributed systems expert Cindy Sridharan, quoted in Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, the answer is “one million dollars”: It takes well over a million dollars just in engineer salary to get Kubernetes up and running from scratch. And you still might not get there.

You manage one of the world’s largest messaging platforms. It’s the middle of the afternoon and you are feeling confidence set in. Your company has recently beefed up its capacity, and performance has never been better. You’re about to step out for a late lunch when a drop in metrics starts triggering alarms. What do you do? *record scratch* Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation…

Every process on the net is a logical journey, including the Google blacklist – even when it’s done in error. Nothing kills profits like losing your web traffic; so here’s all you need to know about blacklists, how to avoid them, and – if your site is branded with a red warning banner – how to get off them.