From the Trenches: Ensuring Cyber Week Success at a Major e-Tailer

by Tony
Over the Black Friday shopping frenzy, I was working with a major online retailer at their corporate headquarters to make sure everything was running at 100%. Honestly, if a customer doesn’t get a response pretty quickly when they hit “submit,” or – even worse – gets an "Oops...something is wrong, and we're fixing it" message, you know they're checking out some other retailer’s site before you can say “page is loading.”


So how important is the end-user's shopping experience? And how can you correctly monitor the end-user's experience in real time? How can you single out a poorly performing transaction, determine the root cause, and be confident that your fix will work so that the next visitor to your site enjoys good performance?

At this retailer we were monitoring and analyzing transactions with OPNET’s AppResponse Xpert throughout cyber week. When we encountered transactions that exceeded response time targets, produced exceptions, or some other anomalies, we used AppResponse Xpert and AppTransaction Xpert together to detect the problem in real-time, capture the transaction, analyze it to diagnose root cause, and address the situation.

From Black Friday through the busy week, we saw over 150 million hits to the site. We saw every shopper’s end-user response time, because AppResponse Xpert monitors all transactions, all the time. It ALSO determines the primary source of delay end-to-end, so we could quickly pinpoint the source of an end-user experience issue.

At one point, we found that end user response time was degrading significantly. Each of the domain teams was already watching over their respective areas - the systems folks were measuring system performance, the network folks were monitoring network performance, the database folks were watching database queries, etc. However the only true end-to-end experience was visible using AppResponse Xpert. It turned out that a bad interaction with the web servers was flooding the database servers with a certain type of repeated request – something that was unnecessary and very disruptive. Using AppResponse Xpert, we immediately identified the errant requests that allowed the applications guys to fix the problem. Without such rich data in front of us, we couldn't have made decisions critical to this retailer enjoying the best Cyber Week ever.