Let’s face it: if you have a website with a public-facing web application, you probably spent a lot of time and money in order see it from an idea all the way to a tangible thing that people can use. You probably spent hours refining your idea, and even more making sure that the end product reflected your original vision. With that said, don’t you think it’s important then to ensure that your app is functioning properly at all times? Think about this for a moment; if you aren’t using some type of service to monitor your web app, how will you know if something goes wrong with it? The truth is that you actually won’t know until people start complaining, and at that point it might be too late! People are very fickle when it comes to the internet and if something isn’t working properly, they won’t think twice about visiting another site or making a different choice.

This is not to mention that if your web app has anything to do with money or making money you could be losing out on a ton of dough by not monitoring it. Let’s say that your shopping cart is down 3% of the time. Depending upon what your revenue is, this could be really substantial, not to mention the overall drop in customer retention rate that you could be having.

So, what are your options? Well, that a good question. The truth is that the best way to monitor web applications is by using an external solution. There are many good providers out there, and most of their prices are quite reasonable depending upon what you want to do with your service. Keeping with the above example, if you need to monitor a simple shopping cart to ensure that visitors can place orders, that would be relatively inexpensive. However, if you want to monitor a large number of user metrics with a lot of steps, that could be quite expensive. It really depends upon how intensive you want or need to be with your monitoring. That will dictate the eventual price that you’ll pay. One nice thing about a lot of the companies that offer web app monitoring services is that they’ll often set you up with a free trial so that you can see if their service works for you before you commit. One of the issues with monitoring apps, is that a lot of services can’t track your data in real time. To the best of our knowledge, there are only a few offerings in the marketplace that can do this. Dotcom-Monitor offers a relatively good product for those looking for a very technical web application monitoring interface. Their tool suite has a lot of options that others don’t, but they can tend to be a bit more expensive than some other competitors. Some people would argue that you get what you pay for there, but that’s something that you’d have to decide for yourself. Another company offering a different, but comparable solution is BMC. Each company has their own way of handling internal/external data, so you need to determine which metric is more important to you and make a decision based on that (and any other important factors).

Whatever you do, make sure that you’re not pressured into signing up for something that isn’t a good fit for you. In the end, you really just want to make sure that your web app is functioning as intended, and you shouldn’t have to break the bank in order to do that.