Hopefully, you now have a good working knowledge of all the factors that affect web availability and performance. Your job is to understand the end user’s experience as a result of these factors. To do this, you need to craft a monitoring strategy that can capture your site’s performance as experienced by end users.

You might do this by testing critical pages or key functions at regular intervals—a synthetic testing model. Maybe you’ll watch individual transactions and measure HTTP timings—RUM. As sites become more complex, you’ll likely add your own application logging to round out the picture.

But as you design an EUEM strategy, remember that every web transaction begins with a set of requests and responses across multiple layers of communications protocols. However complicated a web application becomes, it’s still all about turns, latency, and avoiding errors.

Now that we know all of the steps involved in web application delivery, we can look at how to measure performance.