Performance monitoring helps drugstore.com fix problems in real time

From November 2007

By Liz Parks

drugstore.com has served more than nine million customers since its launch in 1998. Like many online retailers, drugstore.com keeps track of the number of active customers (2.4 million); how much visitors spend on an average order ($75); and repeat visitors (they accounted for 82 percent of second-quarter sales).

Three years ago, IT management sought to gain a better understanding of what customers were experiencing when they made an online visit. Did the pages load quickly? Were customers able to make a purchase without any interruptions? Were they satisfied with their experiences?

drugstore.com needed a performance-monitoring tool to answer these types of questions, and ultimately chose TrueSight appliances from Poway, Calif.-based Coradiant.

Most first-generation performance monitoring companies “had a lot of overhead,” says Don Allen, drugstore.com’s senior director of IT operations. “There were servers running applications, so you had server overhead plus program resource allocation. But because Coradiant is an appliance-based system, you have a single patching solution [that] is easier to implement and maintain.”

drugstore.com has sophisticated systems for capturing, analyzing and reporting data, but they were unable to provide “up-to-the-minute performance monitoring or tell us if a page served a customer an error message,” he says. “There would be time gaps; we were not getting data in real time that would allow us to respond to performance problems immediately.”

Now, the IT department receives an alert as soon as there is a performance issue. “We can immediately go into that session and see what the user clicked onto and determine whether it was an isolated incident, a hiccup, a user error or some type of network issue,” Allen says.

Alistair Croll, co-founder and vice president of products and marketing for Coradiant, says there are two aspects to any e-commerce offer. The first is “Did the customers like it and buy it?”; the second is “Were they able to buy it?” Web analytic products help retailers answer the former; user performance management products address the latter, he says.

Croll cites one Coradiant client that “was frantically trying to find a way to get the three million existing customers they thought they had to buy more.” As it turns out, the company actually had four million customers on any given day, but 25 percent of those shoppers were receiving errors and couldn’t complete a transaction.

“That e-retailer realized it needed to focus not on the three million customers who were getting through, but on the one million who weren’t,” he says.

Installing the TrueSight customer-monitoring appliance was “easy,” Allen says. “It’s an inline tap. We mirrored one of the external ports on our load balancer, and we lined it up and plugged it in. It took minutes, and it really requires minimal training to use.”

Installing watchpoints
Using pre-established parameters or “watchpoints” around areas of the site that they particularly want to monitor, the IT team can monitor each shopper’s web experience from log-in through checkout. The IT team can see whether customers are experiencing slowdowns in the loading of pages and scripts; if they are, team members can diagnose the problem, and an e-mail alert can invite the IT technician or developer to “click here to see the problem.”

A single product mention on a popular TV show or online portal can send traffic streaming to drugstore.com.

“Marketing like that can overflow the site,” says Allen, “so, we put in a watchpoint and set the application to show us how many people are hitting a promotional item in real time. We’ve never had a problem after such a mention, but we like to keep an eye on the site just in case.”

drugstore.com also uses TrueSight to monitor what happens after an operations change of any kind is made.

“Being able to see if user performance got better or worse is huge for us,” says Allen, “especially if we just spent a lot of money to make a change. We did that last year when we upgraded our wide area network: We actually could see that the response time between our customers and our customer service representatives went down by more than 20 percent.”

Having TrueSight also gives IT the ability to answer management questions about the user base. “We recently had a situation where a project team wanted to know how many of our users are broadband versus dial-up,” Allen says. “We were able to log in, run a report and answer the question in just a few minutes.”