As the SaaS sphere continues to grow, it is paramount that SaaS enthusiasts pay close attention to service users’ quality to be successful in both the cloud and on-site infrastructure. Such attention must go to the quality of the service level agreements (SLAs) they get from vendors, SaaS applications by ensuring optimized SaaS monitoring on all aspects.
What is SaaS Monitoring?
Software as a service monitoring is a performance monitoring solution that enables you to have a full view of the aspect of the digital environment of your SaaS company. The digital environment will include both the cloud and on-site SaaS software applications. Such SaaS monitoring goes beyond your company’s assets to include monitoring data activities in the public cloud to increase your control and your awareness of user experience.
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What is the Importance of SaaS Monitoring?
Even though Service level agreements are there to give some assurance of high-quality standard surety, SaaS monitoring acts as an additional level of accountability by confirming the standards set by the SLAs.
Most SLAs are limited to the service provider’s network, apps, and servers. It does not include your company’s infrastructure, and there is always the presence of blind spots. These blind spots are not included as violations of the SLAs but can negatively impact user experience.
SaaS monitoring promotes top-notch user experience by providing users’ experience rapidly to the software publisher at the very moment it happens. This data provision improves awareness, visibility and gives the ability to resolve issues faster.
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Benefits of SaaS Monitoring
SaaS monitoring solutions provide a lot of benefits which include the following;
- Easy to understand and easy to use since you do it with the use of familiar servers.
- It involves low capital expenditure as a result of the absence of excessive physical servers and hardware.
- SaaS monitoring gives you faster upgrades and maintenance
- SaaS monitoring is simple, scalable, and customizable with other SaaS solutions.
- SaaS monitoring also allows for easy integrations with other party applications such as APIs.
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Some Best Practices in SaaS Monitoring
Complete monitoring should include more than just gathering and evaluating SaaS data and KPIs. For the best practice, it should do more. Take up the following best practices to protect your software users’ experience and obtain full-stack visibility.
1. You should aim to comprehend the effect of SaaS performance issues.
Understanding that the impact of issues like latency, downtime, outages, and glitches has a massive stack in the outcome of your business is crucial. This understanding is essential because many things are now online, starting from jobs to shopping, and these issues can affect the performance of your SaaS business.
The use of a SaaS monitoring solution will give protection against such issues and secure your business.
2. Stay in control of operations most important to your SaaS.
Outsourcing certain parts of your SaaS business can be advantageous; however, sometimes, it isn’t beneficial. An example is relying on your service provider to fix issues; this can be time-consuming.
Also, waiting for your users to tell you existing problems is something that mustn’t happen. SaaS monitoring solutions will let you know of existing issues even before your users are affected. This capability to resolve issues very fast is suitable if your aim to up both user experience.
3. Make sure not to base on the dashboard of the service provider.
Most service provider dashboard will cover their assets and not consider your infrastructure. So, make sure to have a secondary security guard. A SaaS monitoring tool can and will protect your digital environment and expand your visibility and make things clearer.
Hence, your SaaS acts as insurance to the SLA, as it considers the existing infrastructure and end-to-end service.
4. Ensure to avail a single source of data and truth.
Making for efficient communication among teams is an essential part of SaaS. The objective, single source of data will represent a shared source of truth. This single source of truth will remove finger-pointing, departmental silos and leads to information from a tremendous digital environment.
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The Top Best SaaS Monitoring Tools You Should Consider
- Senatext – an all-in-one Monitoring tool for logs, tracing, and user analysis.
- Sumo Logic – a cloud-based monitoring solution for log files analysis and consolidation.
- Dynatrace – a new full-fledged and all-in-one SaaS monitoring tool for smart AI technology.
- New Relic – this Monitoring tool is loved by many and is God for Python and Ruby.
- Pagerduty – an alarm dispatching and aggregation service specially made for incident management.
- Pingdom – a simple SaaS monitoring solution for websites.
- OpsGenie – a management solution that gives Integration with a large number of management tools.
- Amazon CloudWatch – this is the monitoring solution for AWD -based infrastructures and resources.
- Elasticsearch – a general-purpose search engine that you effortlessly combine with kibana and logstash.
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SaaS Monitoring Myths You Should Watch Out For
Several SaaS monitoring Myths can derail you from the use of SaaS monitoring. Adhering to these myths can put you in the path of having users with bad experiences because of services outages, downtimes and ultimately might get your users frustrated. Such Myths include;
1. You don’t need SaaS. You have a guaranteed SLA from the service provider.
SLAs are not 100%, include only outages that the provider can control, exclude your infrastructure, and there is no way to know if your provider is in line with them. Except with the use of SaaS monitoring.
2. Your existing tools keep a close eye on your on-premises cloud apps.
This assertion is not valid. Almost all of the traditional system management tools monitor systems with direct access. They can’t monitor web services that have their infrastructure outside the Periphery of IT. What is needed is web monitoring solutions such as SaaS monitoring that runs generic protocols tests.
3. You don’t need a personal monitoring tool; it’s okay to use the service provider’s dashboard.
These dashboards are designed for general status communication and not for real-time monitoring. They always contain information and updates that will not be important to your users. These service provider dashboards, RSS feeds, among other notification tools, will not include end-to-end services which you need.
4. Your users will tell you when they are hanging problems, so you don’t need monitoring.
Outages, downtimes, and other problems that your users might experience are not good if you aim to grow in the SaaS industry. The presence of these might cause a decrease in your conversion rate and other KPIs.
SaaS monitoring such as Mean-time-to-resolution is excellent for your business. You will get to know and resolve such issues even before your users experience them. You can also check if your provider has resolved the issue.
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Don’t be fooled by these myths; you need SaaS monitoring to be at the top of your SaaS game. You should be able to troubleshoot SaaS infrastructure and keep a close eye on SaaS apps.
With SaaS monitoring, you can quickly notice, isolate and fix several problems that will impact your SaaS business’s performance if left unfixed.