As you may already know, we have been working towards our stability and usability initiative a great announcement for our customers has been released today.  With the next update to your website a new service is automatically installed that monitors the site remotely from multiple places outside of our datacenter.  This SiteMonitor service hits each customers' website(s) at periodic intervals and will run key tests against it to determine response time, valid page loads, database connectivity and log the results for future inspection and reporting.  This service does many interesting things for us and was engineered to minimize impact on our servers and the sites while still providing accurate tests.

What do we do with the results?
If something appears to be wrong, our internal monitoring system is notified and it immediately sends notifications to all appropriate team members and on-call support staff no matter the hour.  Emails are sent, text messages, audible alarms in the office and on special monitor computers go off, and internal automated systems kick in to diagnose and switch your site to other servers in the cluster while the down site waits to be fixed.

Why not buy off the shelf software for this?
This was a point of contention for us and we decided to engineer ourselves primarily because we do not just need to test 1 customer site...each customer has a minimum of 2 websites running side by side in our enterprise cluster environments.  If one goes down the other picks up the requests and customer state.  As amazing as that is, we need to test all sites on all web servers to ensure each duplicated website is running properly in the cluster.  Being part of an enterprise web cluster provides our customers an unquestionable level of stability and this system just helps stabilize and prove that even more.  Additionally we log this data to our internal databases for easy reporting later and to tie into other systems that can automatically respond to websites having problems as we work towards our quest for a "Self Healing" Data Center.

Were you not already monitoring systems?
Absolutely, we ran packaged software and some other custom apps that hit sites to determine if the web servers were responding to requests and other smaller tests.  However, the new package runs much deeper tests and interrogates not just the main site, but every duplicated website the customer has across all web farms.  The net result is a much deeper test and analysis.

Who gets site monitoring?
Every AmeriCommerce customer free of charge.  There will be varying frequencies of inspection based on the level of service you are at.  Bronze will be a few times daily, Silver & Gold will be hourly, Platinum every minute.  And by request we can upgrade your monitoring level beyond what is provided, very minimal extra charges may apply.  The reason we would have to charge for more frequent monitoring is due to the amount of bandwidth absorbed by the tests and the resources and servers needed to perform more requests against all of our clients.

Why not do every site every few seconds or minute?
Bottom line, server load and bandwidth.  Neither are cheap, especially in an enterprise environment using the expensive equipment we demand AmeriCommerce to be ran on.  Every request takes bandwidth to send and receive, the server must process that along with other customer requests for real pages.  Multiply that by thousands of sites across multitudes of servers and everything adds up very quickly.  Additionally, very low traffic sites would remain in memory on servers and the number of sites a cluster can host drops substantially if every page of every site is hit every second because the server never gets a chance to reclaim those resources.  Shared clusters depend on reclaiming unused site's resources when processing requests.  This is also why we have to charge a small fee for more frequent monitoring if you want something above your package level.

This is yet another great improvement to our infrastructure that buys everyone, employees and customers, piece of mind and the knowledge that we are out there ready to respond immediately if something happens.  We know how important customers and sales are and you can count on the AmeriCommerce team to help provide you with the tools to make sure both are larger than ever.
 

AmeriCommerce welcomes our newest developer:

Chris Allen: Developer extraordinaire, this new and talented developer will be adding many of the features you request every day

Our team grows constantly and we are excited about the new talent brought to the table.  This hire help strengthen an already strong talent pool and will be instituting much of the change that you, our customer, request and need.  As if it's not enough that we have a monopoly on a truly feature rich multiple storefront ecommerce solution, now we can boast another of the industry's leading talent joining our ranks.

Everyone has noticed and commented on our new myAmeriCommerce Help Portal to help us organize the many avenues of gathering knowledge about the usage of AmeriCommerce.  We are still pulling together all the pieces into a cohesive solution that does everything we want and need it to do.  I am curious what our users think since there are so many options.

Help Desk Ticketing: an organized way of responding to customers and categorizing issues, bugs and feature requests.  Although this system is not yet as polished as we would like, we believe it will be key to ensuring responsive answers and keeping the customers up to date.  It also allows the customers to see their present and past issues so they never lose their place...and so they never forget the value of our service!

Knowledge Base: Published questions and answers, easy to add and update for our support staff, you will see many more of these so if you don't like this avenue tell us now.

User Forums: This is a solution that will take a lot of time and effort to build a community of users helping to support other users.  We plan on incentivizing participation in this arena to help foster widespread support.  What has your experience been with user forums, have they helped you in the past?  Do you think it will be a viable pursuit for us here at AmeriCommerce?

Popup Help: We use this in the AmeriCommerce administration console to give direct immediate help for the feature you are looking at.  Less theory and big picture than immediate feature specific knowledge.  We are planning to add a link straight to related KnowledgeBase articles from here since they will contain more information and other related articles themselves.

Screen Reference Documentation: This is the typical help file scenario found in many applications and is admittedly one of our weaker areas being such a dynamic company with new features popping up daily and one of the harder ones to update and keep up-to-date.  We are searching for a more scalable solution and are investigating other methods for delivering this same content.  How important would you rank this area?  Does the popup help and knowledge base linked together actually make this irrelevant?

Training Videos: An area we plan to invest in heavily as well, guided tours of features and walk-thrus of how to do key things within AmeriCommerce.  Do you like video?  How important given the other areas do you feel it will be as a training aid?

We are trying very hard to enhance our support systems and would love your feedback on it since it will be affecting you so greatly and the choices made now will shape the path of how easy it will be to get help in the future.  Any help you provide will go a long way in furthering your goals as well as ours.  Till next post, have a wonderful day!