In almost every industry, customers expect to learn most information about a company from their web site. Consumers increasingly use a company’s site to place purchases, pay bills, and seek customer support.

Smart leaders of companies also utilize their website to track current and potential customers and learn valuable information about them. With catalogues and long sales pitches over the phone on the decline, and cloud computing very much already here, it’s important that your online presence is solid.

If you are a part of the travel industry, you probably don’t get much from your summer vacation and are in the office right now, planning someone else’s vacation. Or maybe not exactly, but my guess is you still care how that vacation planning is going for the big guys. Luckily for you, this year we monitored the most popular travel websites again and are here to provide you with the results.

We have monitored 12 websites for 5 weeks from 4 different global locations. The monitoring process covers not only the website performance, but a typical complete web transaction – going to the Home page, choosing destination, browsing the search results, and selecting hotel offer. The KPI metrics for the reports are Uptime and Response Time, which are basically the default user experience metrics.

Cloud computing is a development that could change the computer industry. Technology heavyweights such as Microsoft, IBM and Google have already invested millions of dollars into its research, reflecting a growing belief that it’s a method of computing that’ll continue to grow in prevalence, changing, for the better, the way we use computers in our personal and business lives.

If you’re a start-up or small business owner and not too tech savvy, you may wonder what cloud computing actually involves. Essentially, it involves a significant shift in IT system workload with remote, rather than local computers, running everything from e-mail to word processing. You’d simply log into a web-based service that would host all the relevant programs for your business and then go from there. If you’re a user of Hotmail, it would be similar to logging into that.

For all of you who missed the news, we’ve started our Guest Blogging program last month. It’s still fresh and all, so now is the time to shine amongst your peers. We know you have great monitoring tricks up your sleeve and now is the time to show them off.

Who are you?

If you are an IT professional, programmer, system administrator or simply a website owner in the know of your stuff, we are sure you have something to share with our audience. Our blog started in 2009 and in our experience people care about the health of their websites and are eager to learn more on the subject, so why don’t you give it to them?

Performance and availability monitoring plays a crucial role for the health and overall wellbeing of  the modern business infrastructure. However, there still exist some common misconceptions associated with remote website and server monitoring practices. We hope that by revealing the real facts, we will help you make an educated decision so that you can use the optimal arsenal of remote monitoring tools to your advantage.

You need to monitor all your resources

Monitoring every single piece of network hardware is not, by all means, mandatory. Monitoring more than what you really need is neither time- nor cost-efficient. Business-critical systems usually represent only a fraction of your infrastructure. Involving people with intimate knowledge of your IT ecosystem in the decision making process will save you money and time. One of the great features of agentless monitoring solutions is scalability. If you are not quite sure about the resources you need to monitor, start with the basic service and a limited set of servers, or websites. You can always expand and spend on remote monitoring when you need it.