“Since we use Uptrends, we know immediately when there’s an error going on.”

Way2Web Software is a team of professional developers that build custom web applications for their customers. Way2Web provides quality web solutions to a large variety of markets including healthcare, collection agencies, and NGOs (Non-Government Organizations). You name it, and Way2Web has developed solutions for that market.

We spoke with Peter Paul Keulers, IT Manager at Way2Web to find out how they make Uptrends a part of their success. Peter has been with Way2Web for two years… Well, let’s have him tell you his story.

“I started working at Way2Web as IT Manager two years ago. Back then I had a team of three people, and today our team grew to 12. I focus more on the long-term objectives and innovations that we want to implement in the technical field, and that includes the organization of our monitoring. We program everything in Laravel; we became specialists in this. We use an agile approach with two scrum teams and two product owners. We are growing tremendously.”

Uptrends meets Way2Web’s needs—now and in the future

Way2Web uses a multi-faceted approach to their monitoring that includes Uptrends.

“We have monitoring in place on different levels. Hardware monitoring, which we do at our hosting provider. We monitor our system logs, and all our logs are sent to a solution so that we can see errors. Uptrends is our external monitoring tool. I did preliminary research, and Uptrends came out on top when it comes to price and the functionality.”

Way2Webs teams (especially the DevOps team) use Uptrends and pull reports on a daily basis.

“Our DevOps team has full access to the production servers and the monitoring setup allowing them to respond quickly in the event of a problem.”

Alerting their way

An important aspect of any monitoring system is communicating errors. Uptrends offers multiple alerting methods so that Uptrends fits into your team instead of your team adapting to it.

“Since we use Uptrends, we know immediately when there’s an error going on. We know it within the minute. Because the Slack integration works so flawlessly—every one of us is on Slack—we can act on errors the moment they occur.”

Besides Slack, Uptrends offers other integrations including PagerDuty, Statushub, VictorOps, ServiceNOw, and webhooks. Uptrends also has SMS, email, phone/voice, and push notifications via the Uptrends app on iPhone and Android. We have more integrations coming, so keep checking back.

Way2Web has a well-planned DEM strategy

A quality DEM (Digital Experience Monitoring) strategy needs a multi-faceted approach, and Way2Web does just that with their current and future monitoring plans. To help them reach their goals, Way2Web chose Uptrends, and we’ve got the tools!

Uptrends offers multiple synthetic and Real User Monitoring Solutions. Way2Web uses uptime monitoring, Advanced Availability, and Multi-step API monitoring to keep their sites up and running.

Uptime Monitoring

“Every minute, an uptime test verifies if we get back 200’s. If that doesn’t happen, we get a Slack notification in our dedicated Slack channel.”

Uptime monitors check for a site’s availability every minute. If a monitor returns an unexpected result, Uptrends tests the site a second time from a different checkpoint. If the site still errors, Uptrends issues an alert.

Advanced Availability: SSL Monitoring

“We use the SSL check to inform our support department when an SSL certificate is up for renewal and that it works.”

SSL monitors remind you of impending expiration dates, and SSL checks can monitor for changes to your certificate that could also be the predecessor to an SSL hijacking. You can check for changes to the common name, organization, issuer information, serial numbers, and the certificate’s fingerprint.

Multi-step API Monitoring

“Besides these uptime checks, we set up Multi-step API checks. In the context of ISO certification, it is important for us to ensure the safety of our platform. We want to ensure that public access is not possible for certain tools and applications that we have running here and at our hosting provider.”

Multi-step API Monitoring allows you to set up multi-step calls to your API. Test authentication, make assertions on responses, extract variables for use in other requests, and handle redirects.

“With transactions, we don’t have to spend so much time investigating, and we can reassure our customer that we’re already on top of the issue.”

Thinking about Web Application Monitoring (and for a good reason)

“One of our customers called to report that it wasn’t possible to execute payments anymore on their website. After quite some research we discovered that there was an issue with the payment integration. To ensure we’re on top of these kinds of problems before our customer is aware, we want to set up transactions. With transactions, we don’t have to spend so much time investigating, and we can reassure our customer that we’re already on top of the issue.”

Uptrends' Transaction Recorder makes setting up Web Application Monitoring easy. You start the recorder, click through your user path, save the recording to your Uptrends account or submit it for scripting. Our scripting pros can perfect and test the resulting script from your recording for you, or you can test, modify, and manage your script yourself in the application or through Uptrends API.

The transaction monitor can check your critical click paths such as logging in, shopping cart function, and check out. You’ll have no more lost revenue due to malfunctioning transactions.