Website Transaction Monitoring Explained - Plus a Free Website Monitoring Recommendation

Website monitoring is the process of testing or tracking (monitoring) how end-users interact with a website or web applications. Website monitoring is often used by businesses to ensure that their customers are able to access their online applications and perform actions such as searching, online shopping, checking an account balance, or simply researching.

Transaction monitoring is website monitoring that is done using a web browser emulation. Behavioral scripts (or paths) are created to simulate an action or path that a customer or end-user would take on a site. Those paths are then continuously monitored at specified intervals for availability and response time measures.

Another term for transaction monitoring is synthetic monitoring (also known as active monitoring).

Synthetic monitoring is valuable because it enables a webmaster to identify problems and determine if his website or web application is slow or experiencing downtime before that problem affects actual end-users or customers. This type of monitoring does not require actual web traffic so it enables companies to test web applications 24x7, or test new applications prior to a live customer-facing launch.


This transaction monitoring approach is based on managing the application by monitoring the end user response times and then performing customer analytics and system heuristics from the web server outward.

As the shape and face of the internet continue to evolve, it is becoming increasingly apparent that yesterday's solutions are no match for today's challenges. Outdated website monitoring services claim to alert owners to problems, yet even when they give the all-clear signal and indicate that a website is up and running, there can be serious problems that hinder or event prevent visitors from performing common tasks. With today's complex web applications, a web server can be "up", yet still not be working correctly due to a bug in the script, backend code, database or the Flash and Silverlight applets. That is precisely why today's web applications cannot be monitored with yesterday's website monitoring services. They need the next-generation website monitoring services that, until now, were unavailable.

Transaction monitoring is the solution!

There are two general strategies to implement transaction monitoring with this approach; the first is by installing an agent on the user's computer (either on the desktop or in the browser with the help of a java script) and the second is by running real web browser on a server. Some solutions (like AlertFox for instance) have servers around the world that test performance from different regions. The technically most advanced service is AlertFox Website Monitoring, as it is the only service that can even test websites with Flash, Java and Silverlight applets, more commonly referred to as Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Main Advantage
Know what your clients are experiencing - transaction monitoring with this approach enables you to put customers first.

Main Drawback
Transaction monitoring stops at the web server, the few solutions that let you peek beyond that can only provide very limited metrics. You will know that there is a problem, but you will have no idea where to look for it.

Want to try it out? While transaction monitoring services are typically very expensive (several thousand dollar per month is typical), the AlertFox service offers even FREE transaction monitoring accounts.

Alertfox is able to offer free options and very competitively priced PRO accounts because it uses self-service script creation based on the popular iMacros browser add-on. AlertFox users can go one step further, using innovative iMacros technology to create transaction monitoring macros that run directly in the Firefox or Internet Explorer web browser. Also, AlertFox does not have a unnecessary network of hundreds of global monitoring stations. They think three globally distributed centers (America, Europe, Asia) are more than enough. We agree.