You have designed, developed, and deployed a word-class web application; however, that is only the beginning of the story of your app. The web is an ever-evolving, living, breathing environment that demands attention to continue to succeed as a business. In Chapter 11, Highly-Available Cloud Infrastructure on AWS, we went over the basic concepts and costs of ownership of a cloud infrastructure. In this chapter, we will dig deeper in truly understanding how users actually use our application with Google Analytics. We will then use that information to create realistic load tests to simulate actual user behavior to understand the true capacity of a single instance of our server. Knowing the capacity of a single server, we can fine-tune how our infrastructure scales out to reduce waste and discuss the implications of various scaling strategies. Finally, we will go over advanced analytics concepts such as custom events to gain more granular understanding and tracking of user behavior.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

• Google Analytics
• Google Tag Manager
• Budgeting and Scaling
• Advanced Load Testing to Predict Capacity
• Custom Analytics Events

Throughout the chapter, you will be setting up these:

• A Google Analytics Account
• A Google Tag Manager Account
• An OctoPerf Account