When the s#!t hits the fan, you don’t have time to look up who’s on call, draft emails, call collaborators, or send text messages. An instant chat window is definitely the way to go, especially one like HipChat.

HipChat is a true business app. And while it’s tempting to call it a chat application, it’s much more. It’s persistent, searchable, and loaded with extras like group chat, video chat, screen sharing, and airtight security.

So if you’re busy doing other things when a nasty incident ticket starts hogging space on your screen, how quickly and effectively can you get into HipChat? That’s where we come in.

Combined with xMatters, this integration allows individuals to collaborate with the correct on-call resources via HipChat to coordinate and resolve incidents faster. xMatters leverages your group on-call schedules and rotations, escalation rules, and user device preferences to quickly engage the right resources into a targeted HipChat room.

Linking HipChat in your toolchain

Integration xMatters with your monitoring, ITSM, incident management, and communication tools enables you to share data across your entire incident resolution toolchain. Using the xMatters integration, you can open a HipChat room directly from JIRA Service desk or another ITSM system without leaving the ITSM environment.

When you send invitations to collaborate from HipChat, they reference key data from monitoring tools or service management systems. All this data enables your resolution teams to quickly get up to speed and act.

Within the targeted HipChat room, members can use slash commands to see who is on call from a specific team, invite additional resources, and make updates to a service management ticket or StatusPage listing. xMatters eliminates the need to switch back and forth between systems, so your team can resolve incidents instead of worrying about record keeping.

Here are a few other things you can do with the xMatters HipChat integration:

• Automatically assign a JIRA issue to the responder
• Record HipChat activity back into a service management ticket
• Use slash commands to add comments to a service management ticket or StatusPage

Adding HipChat to your xMatters instance is easy. Just visit our Integrations Directory!

This article was originally published on Monitis Blog, you can check it here.

Today it’s fairly well known that high-performing websites and applications bring in more visitors, higher SEO, and ultimately more sales. By the same token, downtime is disastrous for companies and can lead to major hits on a brand, reputation, and overall customer retention.

But there’s often a gap between knowledge and theory. In other words, people get the fact that high web performance is critical for revenue. But the reality is that somehow this gets lost in translation when it comes to implementation.

To be clear, web performance monitoring is defined as “the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application as expected. Website monitoring is often used by businesses to ensure website uptime, performance, and functionality is as expected.”

If website performance is critically important to the success of your website, then what exactly are the key metrics you need to be tracking in order to measure that success? Let’s take a look at this question in more detail.

Page Load Time

This is one of the key metrics in web performance monitoring since everything today is about speed and seconds translate into dollars earned or lost. Page load time measures the time to load every content on a webpage. It’s calculated from the time the user clicks on a page link or types in a web address until the page is fully loaded in the browser.

Unique Visitor Traffic

This important measure tells you how many individual visitors are coming to your site in a predefined timeframe. An upward trend in this area will indicate that you’re providing content that is valuable to your target audience and shows that your marketing campaigns are successful.

Start Render Time 

Start Render Time is the first point in time that something is displayed on the screen. It doesn’t necessarily mean the user sees the page content. In fact, it could be something as simple as a background color. But it’s the first indication that something is happening on a website. Start Render Time has emerged as a key metric in web performance.

Bounce Rate 

This is a measure of the percentage of visitors to your website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are making it to your site but finding nothing of value to keep them there. A good explanation could be that the landing page either has no clear calls to action or else a poor overall design.

Direct Traffic

This is a measure of the traffic that reaches your website directly by typing your URL into their browser, using a bookmark, or clicking on an untagged link in an email or document. This measure can indicate that you’re doing a good job of creating original content through email marketing, newsletters, and other channels.

Requests Per Second

Requests per second is a key metric which tells you how many actions are being sent to the target server every second. A request can be considered as any resource on the page such as HTML pages, images, multimedia files, databases queries, etc.

Throughput 

Generally speaking, throughput is a measure of how many units of information a system can process in a given amount of time. It’s an important metric in web performance because it tells you how much bandwidth is required to handle a load of both concurrent users and website requests. You always want to aim for a higher value of throughput.

Error Rate 

This is a measure of the percentage of problem requests in relation to all requests. If you see a spike in the error rate at a particular point in a load test, then it’s a good indication that something is preventing the application from operating correctly. This is valuable information that you need clear insights on.

Peak Response Time 

This is a metric that looks at anomalies within the average response time by showing elements that are taking longer than normal to load. This metric offers a very helpful way to pinpoint slower than normal applications that should be investigated further.

Landing Page Conversions

This measures the number of visitors who reach your landing page and fill out a form to become a lead. Along with this metric, it’s important to keep eyes on all types of conversions in your marketing funnel (visitor to lead, lead to customer, and visitor to the customer) to ensure that you’re avoiding any roadblocks or bottlenecks that can keep them from converting.

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Read the original post on Monitis Blog.

Hi.  My name is Erik Dietrich, and this is the first time I’ve posted on the Monitis blog.  By way of introduction, I thought it would make sense to talk about my initial experience with Monitis.

Before I do that, though, I need to explain a bit about myself.   Don’t worry.  It’s relevant, I promise.

I’m a techie by trade.  Specifically, I have historically made a living as a software developer, architect, dev manager, CIO, and, these days, IT management and strategy consultant.  On top of that, I write and present frequently, including routine publishing to my own, tech-centric blog.

Because of this, I know a certain tension to which you can, no doubt, relate. I’m talking about the tension between not having time to build and look after your own website and thinking, “what kind of developer am I if I don’t build and look after my own site?”  I feel awkward about it, but over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better to leave my site’s development to WordPress and the folks that make themes for it.  I just don’t have time to take care of it myself.

But this delegation can lead to embarrassing lapses.  I write about software professionalism, IT strategy and the delivery of high quality solutions.  So when someone that follows me on Twitter sends a tweet informing me that my website has gone down, I can’t help but feel silly.  Anyone looking at the situation obviously knows that it’s my hosting company or, perhaps, something with WordPress.  But that doesn’t stop me from feeling the ironic sting of being the last to know about my own outage.

Mitigating Outages for Professionals

When I ran an IT department as the CIO, I had responsibility for some public facing web applications.  I understood acutely the embarrassment of an outage, and I understood how it could be mitigated.  If you become aware of it first and inform your users, you lose far less credibility in their eyes than if they find out and inform you instead.  The outage is still unfortunate for everyone, but you being on top of it makes it seem almost planned to the users that hear of it.

To make sure my group had this advantage, I oversaw the instrumentation of monitoring tools within our network.  This was some years ago now, so I don’t recall the particulars, but I do remember having a dashboard to peruse and getting emails and text notifications to alert me immediately of any problems.  This was powerful stuff.

Mitigating Outages for the Rest of Us

When it comes to my own blog and site, however, this sort of instrumentation never occurred to me.  I had sound reasoning.  An outage on my site is not critical to anyone.  Nobody logs in and interacts with the site in a high-touch way – it’s just content that I publish for people to read.  I don’t lose money when my site was down.

Because of all of these considerations, it made no sense to me to invest in monitoring.  I had a preconceived notion of the cost of such things, since I had, in the past, allocated budget for them.  Had I really gotten serious about it, I would have reasoned that I could probably do better in price a few years later and with different needs, but it never really bubbled up near the top of my own personal priority list.

This changed, however, when I encountered the Monitis product offering.  I’ll fast forward a bit and say that today, I have effective monitoring for my site that gives me exactly the data I want and costs me almost nothing.

Getting Started

I would offer a “how to” at this point, but you’ll have such an easy time it’s honestly not worth the bother.  Go to the main site, click “start monitoring now” and fill out the requested information.  That’s it.  Really.

I did this, and true to what they say, I had monitoring of my site set up within 3 minutes.  At the time I performed the setup, I recall being in something of a hurry, so I just kind of did a fire and forget.  I setup monitoring HTTP for my site, and didn’t think anything more of it for the rest of the day.

The next day, I got the email shown below.  I saw that they had hit my site with HTTP requests from 3 different locations.  Cumulative uptime of 100%, too.  I won’t lie — I was a bit relieved to see that “all good” seemed to be the default state of affairs.

For a few more days, I continued to receive this daily summary.  I had an even larger sample size of things being alright, and, about a week in, I found myself with a bit more time to dig into the monitoring itself.  I logged into my newly-created Monitis account and poked around in my dashboard.

The default monitoring that I had setup involved 3 locations making HTTP requests all day to my site.  If any 2 locations failed simultaneously, I would receive an email alert that my site was down.  At the time, I had signed up for a trial account, so my next bit of curiosity was “what will this cost me.”  When I went to the pricing page and punched up what this would cost on an ongoing basis, I found the result quite reasonable: $1.20 per month.

Wow.

My Takeaway: The Value Proposition

I could kick myself for not doing research earlier. I keep my finger on the pulse of many different trends and technologies.  And, if you would have asked me whether or not some kind of affordable site monitoring technology existed, I imagine I would have said, “gosh, probably.”

And yet, I never went out and did the research.

The obvious lesson here is that affordable and effective monitoring for your site exists.  Even if your site is simply you posting a food recipe or two per month, and a couple of your relatives reading it every now and then, it’s probably worth about a dollar per month to make sure it runs smoothly.  Call it peace of mind or call it professional pride.  Either way, if you have a site, you might as well keep an automated eye on it.

But the deeper lesson here is one of cost and specialization.  Cloud technology and its ramifications extend beyond, “it’s easy to provision a server.”  All facets of traditional IT are becoming commoditized and offered affordably and with good quality to people with budgets of all sizes.  If it’s been achievable for the enterprise for years, keep your eyes open, because, quite probably, a version is achievable for you as well.

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