Important Components of a Strong Transaction Monitoring Tool

There is a tremendous increase in the number of online transactions has the web has become a medium for businesses to deliver their products and services. As the website becomes the main tool for businesses to conduct a majority of activities, transaction monitoring becomes an important component of ensuring that end users can use the website without problems. Despite the importance of smooth transactions, there are many points at which they can break down: validation of credit cards can fail, pages might fail to load or e-commerce websites may run out of stock. Such failures can be avoided with the help of active monitoring and transaction monitoring by the IT team. Through transaction monitoring, businesses can make sure that all users have a consistent experience when undertaking transactions. This, in turn, ensures that the users are able to conduct online transactions smoothly. If there is no active monitoring and transactions break down, the business risks losing clients to a competitor, whose website gives the user a better experience. Proactive application monitoring for smoother transactions is hence a must for businesses depending on their website for revenue.

Some Important components of an online transaction monitoring solution are as follows:

• Transaction monitoring from users perspective
  A strong transaction monitoring solution has to take into account all the elements which affect the users’ transactions from not only within firewalls but from outside them as well. Active monitoring of all transactions from the user’s perspective will help the IT team in making the user experience as smooth as possible by eliminating all bottlenecks.
  
  
• End to end transaction monitoring
  A user might use multiple pages of the website in order to complete a transaction. Each page, in turn, undertakes transactions in order to complete the transaction. It is not enough for IT teams to know that there was a problem in the process; they need to know exactly where the problem took place. A transaction monitoring solution monitors the transaction from end to end, so that a problem can be pinpointed easily.
  
  
• Easy to use
  A good transaction monitoring tool should be easy to use and deploy, and should make the work of IT team easy. The transaction monitoring solution should be able to undertake active monitoring of all transactions so that the users’ experience is made as smooth as possible.
  
  
• Reliable
  Companies looking for a transaction monitoring solution should look for an experienced service provider, which provides reliable solutions for businesses. The IT team should be able to undertake active monitoring with the help of such a reliable tool so that problems can be solved before end users are affected by them.

The number of service providers offering transaction monitoring tools for businesses has risen in the past few years. A customized solution from an experienced service provider can help businesses in undertaking active monitoring and application monitoring for smoother transactions.

4 Features of a Good Application Monitoring Tool

Businesses which rely in their IT infrastructure for business-critical activities need a strong monitoring system or monitoring tool for determining whether their applications are functioning properly or not. However, business owners and IT managers usually struggle to find an ideal monitoring tool for its IT infrastructure, which suits all its business requirements and helps prevent bottlenecks which affect the bottom line. In this post, we discuss some critical features your application monitoring tool should have, in order to become a strong tool for system monitoring.

A strong application monitoring tool should have the following four features:

1. Support For All Applications

Until a few years ago, monitoring tools offered support for specific popular applications only. This meant that businesses needed to deploy different monitoring tools to monitor various applications used by them. However, with the increasing requirement of a single monitoring system which can monitor all applications throughout the organization, new vendors have now come up with a single monitoring tool. Such an all-encompassing monitoring system eliminates the requirements of different tools as well as reduces costs.

2. Real Time Alerts

A strong monitoring tool is one which can provide real time alerts on application availability and their response times, which helps IT managers in knowing the performance of all applications. Such a monitoring system helps IT managers establish a threshold, and generate real time alerts in case those established thresholds are crossed. IT managers can then take the appropriate steps to overcome those bottlenecks before they start affecting end users.

3. Proactive And Consistent Monitoring

Application monitoring needs to be undertaken proactively and consistently by the monitoring system so that application health issues can be addressed as soon as possible. With such proactive application monitoring, bottlenecks can be prevented before they become bigger problems. Such a monitoring tool can help IT teams ensure application availability, so that all the business-critical applications function 24/7 without a hitch.

4. Non-intrusive

An ideal monitoring system should also be non-intrusive to the production environment. Find a monitoring tool which does not install any element on the database servers. Such a non-intrusive and independent monitoring tool will ensure that, all applications across an organization are monitored constantly and any bottlenecks can be avoided before they start affecting end users.