16. 04. 2020 Franco Federico NetEye, Visual Synthetic Monitoring

Monitoring Users’ Online Experience when Ordering during the COVID-19 Emergency

After the government recently passed a law asking everyone to limit travel and gatherings, I decided to only shop online.

I’m not alone in this – many other people decided to do this too, bringing the sites that provide these services down to their knees, since a large number of users were all trying to make purchases at the same time.

First Amazon Prime, and then many other brands began restricting when purchases or deliveries could be made during the day.  So at that point, how do you know when there are available shopping slots at a given site?

I decided to use Alyvix 3 to monitor the site that I usually shop at, and I built a test case to monitor what happens on the site every 5 minutes, checking if there are any slots available.

Alyvix 3 is very simple to use and I was able to quickly create a new test case to implement my requirements. To start playing with the tool, I recommend watching this YouTube video tutorial. I used the subscription version so that I could run it without having to keep a remote session open, and I let the test case run all day.  I found that in most cases it was always busy as you can see from this screenshot:

But at some point free and green slots finally appeared:

Now knowing at what time these slots opened, I could check out shopping availability for that period and complete my order.

The business case here is quite clear:  you can check even when an event is not occurring (a slot is finally free) and report it.

For this, I used NetEye, the visual monitoring system that we offer to our customers.

Franco Federico

Franco Federico

Hi, I’m Franco and I was born in Monza. For 20 years I worked for IBM in various roles. I started as a customer service representative (help desk operator), then I was promoted to Windows expert. In 2004 I changed again and was promoted to consultant, business analyst, then Java developer, and finally technical support and system integrator for Enterprise Content Management (FileNet). Several years ago I became fascinated by the Open Source world, the GNU\Linux operating system, and security in general. So for 4 years during my free time I studied security systems and computer networks in order to extend my knowledge. I came across several open source technologies including the Elastic stack (formerly ELK), and started to explore them and other similar ones like Grafana, Greylog, Snort, Grok, etc. I like to script in Python, too. Then I started to work in Würth Phoenix like consultant. Two years ago I moved with my family in Berlin to work for a startup in fintech(Nuri), but the startup went bankrupt due to insolvency. No problem, Berlin offered many other opportunities and I started working for Helios IT Service as an infrastructure monitoring expert with Icinga and Elastic, but after another year I preferred to return to Italy for various reasons that we can go into in person 🙂 In my free time I continue to dedicate myself to my family(especially my daughter) and I like walking, reading, dancing and making pizza for friends and relatives.

Author

Franco Federico

Hi, I’m Franco and I was born in Monza. For 20 years I worked for IBM in various roles. I started as a customer service representative (help desk operator), then I was promoted to Windows expert. In 2004 I changed again and was promoted to consultant, business analyst, then Java developer, and finally technical support and system integrator for Enterprise Content Management (FileNet). Several years ago I became fascinated by the Open Source world, the GNU\Linux operating system, and security in general. So for 4 years during my free time I studied security systems and computer networks in order to extend my knowledge. I came across several open source technologies including the Elastic stack (formerly ELK), and started to explore them and other similar ones like Grafana, Greylog, Snort, Grok, etc. I like to script in Python, too. Then I started to work in Würth Phoenix like consultant. Two years ago I moved with my family in Berlin to work for a startup in fintech(Nuri), but the startup went bankrupt due to insolvency. No problem, Berlin offered many other opportunities and I started working for Helios IT Service as an infrastructure monitoring expert with Icinga and Elastic, but after another year I preferred to return to Italy for various reasons that we can go into in person :) In my free time I continue to dedicate myself to my family(especially my daughter) and I like walking, reading, dancing and making pizza for friends and relatives.

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