Coradiant’s TrueSight End-User Experience Management product evokes a number of interesting reactions when we first start monitoring a customer’s Web traffic.  One of the most common reactions is amazement at just how many bugs exist – even in the best Web applications.  One customer speaking at a luncheon described the experience as being similar to turning on the light in your apartment and seeing big ugly cockroaches everywhere – you are appalled, you are embarrassed … and you feel a strong urge to simply turn off the light.

This might seem like a damning statement to make about one’s own environment.  And yet we repeatedly hear how such confrontations with the ugly truth have provided insights that resulted in the correction of long-standing problems, some of which had never even made it onto the radar of Web Operations.  I think you would have to struggle to find a Coradiant customer that did not have a similar story to tell. One customer discovered that 30% of their traffic consisted of cache hits (where the server reports that nothing has changed) or redirects.  By simply tweaking the caching parameters returned by their web servers, they reduced the load on their servers significantly.  Another customer discovered that some pages were taking up to 1.5 minutes to be handled by the server before a response was being sent back to the browser.  Yikes.

How many users are hitting your site?  How many errors are being returned?  How slow are the pages?  How reliable is the network?  Some customers are clearly floundering without any real ability to answer these fundamental questions.  Other customers believe they already have a solid handle on such issues.  We have found that almost all of them have a real shock in store.  Some of our most loyal customers are those that firmly believed they knew the truth already.

Often, though, the insight doesn’t have to be that deep to be a revelation.  It never ceases to amaze me how often web sites are thrown over the fence to be supported by a team that hasn’t the first clue about what they have taken on.  We offer a fairly simple feature that reports lists of traffic attributes sorted by popularity – e.g., URLs, hosts, client IP address blocks, geographic regions, cookie keys, etc.  Our customers can define their own fields as well, pulling whatever they would like out of the traffic to do so (e.g., database error codes, product IDs, etc).  We use this feature to help populate configuration fields.  However, the contents of those lists proved to be such a revelation to our customers that we re-categorized the feature under “Reports”.  Using this simple feature, one of our customers noticed that we were seeing internal traffic that we should not have been able to see.  This led him to realize that his routers were improperly configured.

The customer that we had invited to speak at our luncheon finished off his presentation by advising others – somewhat jokingly – to consider carefully whether they were truly ready to handle the truth about their traffic.  Ugly as it may be, facing it can reveal real solutions to real problems.  I highly recommend it.