In every business and organization today, there’s a massive emphasis placed on “customer experience.” That’s true even in B2B industries, where providing a first-rate and responsive service is as necessary for good relations with partners and clients as it is for the operators of customer-facing e-commerce sites or mobile apps.

With consumers, alternative suppliers of their choice of goods or services are just a screen tap away. Similarly, in B2B markets, competitors’ are also only a step away in cyberspace — and providing clients with the very best in service or offering is just as an exacting requirement.

Maintaining the standards

When presenting any offering on the internet, be that a web app, a remote service, full cloud-based SaaS, or even a smaller back end element to a more substantial offering, maintaining the quality of service is of paramount importance. Even a 99.9 percent uptime is often considered second-rate: many service users are seeking the so-called “five nines” level of service — 99.999 percent— that the very best can supply.

Most business- or consumer-facing applications today comprise many elements that operate from different platforms and may even be sited on different sides of the globe. Databases serve clusters of application servers; production systems are subject to updates from testbeds; development teams work in duplicated environments; failover facilities mirror live systems; archive systems; security setups — the outward face to applications hides many discrete parts to the offering.

In today’s applications, too, microservices and containers are playing an increasing role. The technology’s advantages include the ability that many companies now expect, namely the ability to scale up or down a service as rapidly as the business demands, meaning rapid deployments and high-performance are a must.

The monitoring and testing toolkits

So how can a business today ensure that every different element right across its domain is performing as it should, and thus not impacting on the user experience?

Many IT teams have a rattling bag of tools that they use to keep an eye on software systems, real and virtual servers, network nodes, and internet connections. The problem with that approach is that the results from the tools used to monitor the throughput of, for instance, and MPLS connection produce information quite different from a software agent reporting on a Kubernetes orchestration cluster.

That means that when the end-user starts experiencing a service that falls short of the elusive “five nines” level, pinpointing the problem is highly problematic. There’s no joined-up view of the entire topology, so solving the problem can take days, not seconds, to address.

And that timeframe is ample for the customer (a person or organization that’s the service user) to switch suppliers.

As you might expect from a company like Zoho which offers a broad range of platforms and services, the company’s Site24x7 offering similarly covers off the entire IT stack. It proactively monitors and reports on every aspect of the enterprise network, from the remote edge node’s IoT provision to cloud-based services, to data center operations. In short, this is a product that unifies all networked real estate data in one place.

The ability to visualize where issues arise as a result of a recent change internally, or peak in demand, makes the Site24x7 unique in its space. With lightweight agents on any node (licenses cover total monitoring agent numbers, not single agent uses), it’s quicker and easier to spot trouble proactively, even before it happens. And issues arising can be addressed, either by IT intervention or by automated systems.

Testing the capability

Any good IT department is proactive, not reactive. The Site24x7 platform offers several forms of system stress testing, which help IT ensure that problems simply aren’t given a chance to arise. With a host of application performance capabilities and both real and simulated user testing, the entire IT stack can be tested to ensure that at all times, the very best end-user experience is maintained.

This level of granular insight creates, conversely, a broad picture of how critical applications and services are performing, on a second-by-second basis. From metrics on a single webpage to visibility into EC2 hypervisor instances, the Site24x7 platform helps today’s businesses deliver the type of user-centricity that ensures customer loyalty.

To learn more about how you can unite your IT oversight and create a proactive monitoring and testing capability, register for one of the twice-weekly online demos, today.