Episode 85: Website Monitoring, Usage, and Stats

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Asking the right questions about how to handle your web application is only half the battle, you need monitoring, usage, and stats to properly answer them.

News/Follow-Ups – 02:11

• Snipt.net goes open source
• Gmail priority inbox

Geek Tools – 12:37

• Tupperware Sandwich Keeper

Web Apps – 16:11

• Hipmunk – Funky way to plan your flights (via Rob Lund)
• AirDropper – Get files from people directly in your Dropbox (via Steve Bristol)

Website Monitoring, Usage, and Stats – 22:22

• Usage Questions
  • Should you support IE6?
  • Should you upgrade your host/server?
  • Should you refactor code or infrastructure?
  • Should you add redirects for old links coming from other sites?
  • When should you take your site down for maintenance if you have to?
  • What features of your site are actually being used?
  • Are certain users seeing errors when they come to your site?
• Only around 1% of users will comment or leave feedback.
• Monitoring
  • Do you know if/when your website goes down or becomes slugish?
  • CPU
  • Memory usage
  • Uptime
    • Site-Monitor
    • Pingdom
    • BrowserMob
  • Shopping cart working?
    • Write a selenium script
  • Performance
  • Errors and bugs
    • Email alerts
    • 404s, include referrer
• Usage
  • What are your peak times?
  • How many concurrent users?
  • What are your most used features/pages?
  • API usage by Key, feature, time of day
  • Is your search relevant?
• Stats
  • Google Analytics
  • Boomerang
  • Errors – Regular check log files for errors and try to track them down
  • Usability captures - Clicktale
  • Paid vs Free users?
  • A/B split testing
    • Google Website Optimizer
  • What keywords are people searching for within your site?

Tags: airdropper, boomerang, Clicktale, hipmonk, pingdom, snipt

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 3:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Episode 85: Website Monitoring, Usage, and Stats”

• Tyghe Says:
  January 10th, 2011 at 8:46 pm

  I turned off priority inbox after ten minutes of using it. Similar to Mark, I have quite a few labels, each has a filter that applies that label. With multiple inboxes I have pretty much already created my own priority inbox.

  One of the most useful filters I made looks for key words and phrases for orders and applies an orders and tracking label because I also check tracking info every hour.

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