How Application Monitoring Can Improve Your Business Intelligence

In the current internet age, any organization relies on a number of different systems to keep track of the various aspects of their business, which can lead to data silos. We’ve written before about how eliminating these data silos by integrating the data from the different systems can improve a company’s marketing and sales efforts, but the benefits that come from doing so extend much further. To be specific, integrating these systems can ensure that your IT and development staff also reap the rewards of an improved digital strategy that provides the business intelligence you need to function effectively.

Website Health

As the center of your digital strategy, your website is more important than ever. But while you might use marketing automation to keep up with how you maintain your digital presence and interact with your online audience, the health of the website itself can sometimes be overlooked. That’s not to say that your IT staff isn’t doing their job, but even if they are using a tool such as SCOM to monitor the health of your server architecture, the data they track is often separate and independent from the health of the website application itself.

This has created another type of data silo, which can make it difficult to gain insight into the true health of your website. It’s important to be able to understand how the site is responding to visitor requests. Is it generating any errors, whether they are visible to users or occurring behind the scenes? Is it scaling to meet its load? Are there any scripts that are slowing down site performance? How long do its assets take to load? If there are any errors, what exactly is triggering them?

The Solution, With Additional Benefits

Answering these questions and understanding how they affect the health of your site can make the difference in ensuring that you can meet your business goals. Just as marketing automation services such as HubSpot can integrate the systems that track information about your customers and business, a product like New Relic can eliminate technological data silos, giving you a true picture of how your site is performing from an application perspective.

What’s more, the benefits of combining this data with information from your other systems goes beyond simply monitoring your site’s health. Integrating this data across your entire organization extends past the technical level, informing how you do business. Understanding what is going on with your site that isn’t readily visible gives you deep insight into your digital strategy and provides you with essential business intelligence.

To return to the analogy that we often use, if your website is like a car, it may seem to be running fine when you drive it, but you don’t’ know what is going on under the hood. Maybe you need an oil change or a new air filter, or maybe one of your turn signals isn’t working correctly, but you have no way of knowing. Your website can be in a similar situation, but application monitoring not only lets you know exactly how the site is performing, but it also gives you understanding about how it is being used, allowing you to tune it to perfection.

As your site becomes the focal point of your digital strategy, it is more important than ever to have the tools in place to take advantage of every opportunity available. Application monitoring is something that cannot be ignored. Do you have any questions about how we can help you implement application monitoring and eliminate both technical and marketing data silos? Please contact us to speak with a Solutions Engineer, or share any other thoughts and questions in the comments below.