The web is getting more complex by the day. Visitors to your websites want to put things in a shopping cart, create accounts and log in, fill in forms, and more. Most of these important activities require a complex sequence of pages and scripts, working together to accomplish the desired outcome.
This means that not only do you want to make sure your website is up, you also want to make sure that important website functionality is working.
Today, we’re announcing a beta program for a new tool we’re developing, which will help you tackle some of this increasing complexity. With the Pingdom Transaction Monitor, we want to enable you, our customers, to monitor such transactions to see that they are doing what they should.
Pingdom Transaction Monitor
The Transaction Monitor is a new type of check that can be enabled in the Pingdom control panel once the service goes live. It will allow you to specify, step by step, what you want Pingdom to monitor on your website. And when something goes wrong, you get detailed information to help you fix any problems.
The editor is really the core of the Transaction Monitor. Basically, you tell the editor – in plain English – what website you want the transaction monitor to visit, and what actions or validations you want it to perform. From there on, you just select which actions you want to the monitor to execute, and in which order.
To make the editor as user friendly as possible, we made sure it provides instant feedback, has code auto-completion, and intelligence to know what actions are possible to perform on the target website.
Once you have set up all the steps in the transaction you want to monitor, you can save the check, and we will execute it every 10 minutes.
You can test drive the Transaction Monitor editor right now at www.pingdom.com/transactionmonitor.
Exclusive beta invites going out right now
Our Transaction Monitor is now available in a beta program and invites are going out to a select group of beta testers right now.
If you’re one of the lucky few to receive such an invite, we hope you will enjoy the Transaction Monitor and really put it to the test. Also, please give us feedback on it so we together can make it into an indispensable tool that will help you monitor critical sequences of events on your websites.
If you did not receive an invite, don’t be discouraged. Just head over to www.pingdom.com/transactionmonitor, and click the button to register your interest. We will then get in touch when the beta opens up to a wider set of users.
As it is a beta version of the Transaction Monitor, you should be aware that functionality and design could change at any given time. Data that is gathered during the beta phase, as well as checks created, may not be available once the service goes live.
We’ll of course continue to develop the Transaction Monitor during the beta phase, and intend to move rather quickly to turn it into a live, shipping product. This is in keeping with what we believe in: to develop something, get it out there, fix, develop, and iterate.
A key part of website monitoring
We believe that transaction monitoring is a key part of website monitoring. And soon, what that was previously left to developers to set up, will be accessible to anyone with basic web skills.
The Transaction Monitor represents an important step in our quest to make the web faster and more reliable, and we’re really excited to see what our customers will do with this new tool.