When you are looking to implement DevOps in your organization, one starting point that may help you gain support for implementation is to get a monitoring service up and running for your website, web apps, or both.
Being able to show management that improvements could be made to performance, customer experience, and sales could give you an avenue in which you can offer DevOps implementation as a method of making the improvements quickly and easily, thus leading to further gains in all of these areas.
So, what could monitoring data have in it that may be good examples of where improvements could be made to your IT infrastructure?
Amazon experienced 1 % loss in revenue per 100 ms site load delay
Source: Paessler Blog
The performance of your website or app can make a very big difference when it comes to your organization’s bottom line. Any sort of delay or bottleneck can cost you sales. For instance, a potential customer that has to wait for your website to load for more than a couple of seconds is very likely to leave and pursue a purchase elsewhere.
A slow response when trying to make a purchase could have the same end result, as the customer may feel like the site or app is down because it is not responding in a timely manner. It could also result in customers wanting refunds that did get through the process because they never saw a response that the transaction was successful.
These types of issues could be caused by your network, lack of site or app optimization, a slow database server or connection, or a number of other things. Having an automatic monitoring solution in place can help you pinpoint the origin of the problem and give you insight into how DevOps could be helpful in solving the issue.
As mentioned before, performance is a key factor in customer experience, but not the only one. A monitoring service could prove helpful in finding that potential customers are getting held up on specific pages or interactions for some reason.
For example, users may be having trouble finding a button that adds an item to their cart or may have the same trouble finding the right item to click to finalize a purchase. Any number of interactions could cause a bottleneck. Searches taking too long, menus that must be opened to complete an action but the user cannot find the menu controls, content that is only available on mouseover (mobile devices don’t have mouses for this action), and many other possibilities.
Again, the implementation of a monitoring service, in addition to user testing, can be extremely helpful in determining where users are having trouble interacting with your website or web app.
Walmart increased conversion rate by 2 % for every 1 second of load time improvement
Source: Paessler Blog
As noted above, customer conversions are the end result of the other issues. As you clean up things such as load time (the quote above shows how much a single second of improvement in load time helped Amazon in this area), you should also get a notable improvement in customer conversions!
If users find that your site or app loads quickly and that they can find the interactive controls they need to gather and purchase items, they will be far more likely to complete purchases than they would otherwise. This can be a great help in convincing management that DevOps could be extremely helpful to the organization in order to address the issues at hand and convert more sales.
DevOps needs (and in effect, creates) a culture of knowledge and information sharing, that leads to collaboration between the various teams. The practice of DevOps principles not only is beneficial for the performance of software development and operations, but it also has a very positive impact on the web service development and quality assurance performance.
Source: Cigniti
Since the implementation of DevOps helps to drive collaboration, you will see that it is a great solution for optimizing your organization’s website or web apps for the varied issues that users may encounter. As noted above, this could be anything: performance, database issues, development issues, or design issues.
Oftentimes, there is room for improvement in more than one of these areas, and DevOps implementation allows your teams to work together smoothly and quickly to address all of the issues simultaneously. Not only will monitoring help you find the issues, but you can then show how DevOps is the best solution for your team to tackle these issues in tandem!
