4 Sherpas took an adventure to Toronto for the Full Stack Toronto Conference 2015, these are some of the ?things they learned...
“Big Brother is watching” is a term that has been thrown
around often. Usually the context of its use revolves around government spying
and policing the masses. In the case of IT, the sole purpose is metrics – Who
is doing what, when, and what are they up too?
Monitoring implemented into your Application Layer can offer
an insight into several areas:
Performance specs – how long your
processes run for. Monitoring the length of individual processes or groups of
processes allows you to see where your time is spent. Are the pauses in render
or display time taken up in data transfer? Is it caused by calculations?
User… usage? – What are your users
doing? What are they trying to do? When are they doing it, what times, and what
are they experiencing in response time?
Outdated methods – Has your site
progressed and updated recently but you are not fully sure that you want to
delete a certain process yet? Alerting someone that a deprecated method is
still being called makes for a pretty quick response time. Figure out why the
method is being called in order to either redirect your users, or perhaps bring
that feature back.
Monitoring does a couple things in your favour:
First, it puts you in charge of who
catches issues initially. When a client catches problems, there is usually hell
to pay. If a client reports a problem, it is probably loud and heated. If you
go to your client with the strength and confidence of “there is a problem that
we are working on,” your client will respect your position that you are in
control of the situation.
Secondly, it removes the ownership
of knowledge of a project. When all projects are being monitored in the same
fashion, all project issues are equally accessible. When anyone can access
issues, everyone can help address the issues – even if the sole developer is
away on vacation.
So while monitoring is good for performance and is good for
the future of UX, it is also good for sales. Having a dashboard for your
account team to visually see what is working for certain clients, can aid in
the sell to another providing proof of UX that can be presented to the client.
On the technical side, monitor everything. Not necessarily
always, but at least until you are confident that something works – and works
well, and when that happens, turn it off on that process (or not.) As well, if
it can be measured, it is worth measuring; knowing what works and doesn’t work
will tell you whether to invest time into similar features for future projects.