Mobile Web Performance – Track Load Times for Mobile Users

Monitoring Uptime and Getting Outage Alerts

Your website speed on mobile devices may not necessarily be the same as on desktop due to network limitations, data throttling, and many other factors. However, uptime needs to be monitored in the same way for desktop users. You need a network of test servers in various locations to ping your website regularly and detect if there’s an outage, triggering an immediate alert. This is what Pingdom offers.

• Server availability testing – Pingdom will ping your server every 60 seconds and send you an alert the moment the connection fails. To detect location-specific issues, such as a CDN outage, Pingdom has a network of more than 100 test servers to help ensure all users have uninterrupted access to your website, regardless of their location.
• Website status alerts – Pingdom sends notifications if your website is unavailable and if critical site transaction is broken. Alerts can be sent via a range of channels, including text messages, push notifications, emails, or group messaging platforms, such as Slack. This way, you can make sure the correct person gets notified about an outage in the most suitable way, so the troubleshooting process can start as soon as possible.
• Historical data for your analysis – Pingdom performs numerous tests you can later analyze to see the impact of website changes on web performance over time. Transaction tests are kept forever, while user-specific data available in the visitor insights report is stored for up to 400 days. Data retention period for page speed tests is two weeks.

Optimizing Web Performance

Monitoring uptime is simply one part of the story. At the end of the day, it’s the entire end user experience that matters most. Pingdom offers handy tools to help you verify how fast your site is for actual visitors and website elements are underperforming or have failed.

• Comprehensive page speed analysis – The best websites fine-tune every page element for maximum speed and reliability. Pingdom page speed monitoring tests webpages to identify bottlenecks. You get a detailed overview of what works and what doesn’t, including image download speeds, SQL query execution times, script errors, etc. Pingdom then assigns aggregated performance grades to summarize the results of every test and provide an action plan for further optimization.
• Real user monitoring – Pingdom helps you analyze load times not only in a testing environment, but also as experienced by actual visitors. Use the real user monitoring (RUM) feature to analyze web performance in real time based on browser and platform used and geographic location of site visitors.
• Transaction monitoring – All interactions on your website are important. Pingdom helps you monitor all site transactions including the most crucial ones to help ensure users can do things like sign up, add items to the shopping cart, add credit card details, complete purchases, etc. You’ll get alerted immediately if any step of these interactions has failed.

Leveraging the Pingdom API

Pingdom is a highly capable tool for web performance and availability monitoring, but what makes it exceptional is its flexibility and extensibility for developers. The Pingdom API, which is RESTful and HTTP-based, allows developers to automate interactions with the synthetic monitoring. They can write their own scripts or applications, making the most of Pingdom capabilities, which otherwise are accessible only from within the Pingdom product. There are endless possibilities with the Pingdom API. Teams can use the API and webhooks to get alerts on their preferred applications (Slack, PagerDuty, etc.). They can also view various graphs from Pingdom in Klipfolio for unified analysis, over even create a Jira ticket for any outage using Zapier. Developers can use CRUD endpoints for automated configuration of uptime and transaction checks in larger dynamic environments. You can learn more about the Pingdom API and what makes it developer-friendly here.

Integrating Pingdom With Third-Party Services

Web developers and IT operations teams need many tools and services to stay on top of the environments they manage. Pingdom integrates with third-party apps for customized alerting/incident management, reporting, and dashboards. In this way, Pingdom can complement your organizations’ existing tools and processes for monitoring and management of websites and supporting infrastructure. Learn more about these integrations here.

Creating Shareable Reports

SolarWinds Pingdom provides shareable reports on your website availability and performance monitoring, which can help you optimize the website for a consistent experience across all screens. You can correlate data from uptime reports, transaction reports, page speed analysis, and real user monitoring (RUM) dashboards to stay on top of your online assets. Some of these reports can be scheduled and sent via email to your team on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.