Yesterday BrowserMob launched monitoring services on two more clouds GoGrid and Rackspace. This allows users to monitor their websites from four different regions now: Washington, Dublin, San Francisco, and Dallas. We are very excited to have added two new clouds since it will giving customers the ability to see how their site loads from different parts of the country and different network paths.

If there is a region that you’d particularly like to see let us know since we plan on rolling out more locations over the next few months.

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Often times website outages cost a company money, and depending on the type of website this can calculation can be simple or difficult. If an e-commerce website goes down for an hour one can simply use the normal volumes to calculate the cost, but for reservation systems this can be more complex. For instance, if an airlines reservation system goes down the real cost both lost bookings and the cost of call operators.

“Of course when the web goes down, people are going to turn to the call centre and that’s why we were for a brief period this morning getting swamped there,” said Richard Bartrem, WestJet’s vice-president of culture and communications. (via Calgary Herald)

The cost of having a human being take a phone call for reservations is much greater than that of a website booking. A quick look for articles yielded this insight from Travel Procurement:

Cost savings is a major driver. PhoCusWright (3) estimated a self-service booking without manual intervention runs between $4 and $8, while a call center phone reservation can be between $15 and $65. (via Travel Procurement)

So not only did WestJet lose some bookings, but they also incurred greater costs in salaries and phone bills. Something to take into consideration next time you’re trying to calculate the cost of your website going down.

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After running the load test customer’s often download the database and run queries to determine their sites performance. Here are some common SQL queries to get you started:

# Analyze the avg, max, and min time for each step in a transaction
SELECT step, COUNT(*), AVG(time_active), MAX(time_active), MIN(time_active) 
FROM step GROUP BY step
 
# General query to look at loading of objects
SELECT path, COUNT(*), AVG(time_active) 
FROM object GROUP BY path 
ORDER BY AVG(time_active) DESC
 
# Get error msg grouped by error, host, status
SELECT err_msg, host, status_code, COUNT(*), AVG(time_active) 
FROM object GROUP BY err_msg, host, status_code

We hope that you find these a useful starting point for your load testing analysis.

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