Tag: Microsoft

How to Really Map a Namecheap URL to Your Static Azure Cloud Website

You finally buy that cute-sounding website address, and then some time later, you pick a cloud platform to host your website. These days, that’s starting to be a typical scenario. Cloud computing has brought the price of owning your own website down to very reasonable costs. Likewise, with the expansion of website domain addresses beyond the classic “.com” URL, the cost and ease of getting your own web address has improved. But when it comes time to use your shiny new website address you bought at a domain name registrar like Namecheap.com to deploy your website to your inexpensive Azure cloud account, that’s where things get a little tricky.

Both Namecheap.com and Microsoft offer online Help articles to walk you through the process, but not specifically for deploying a Namecheap.com registered domain to a static Azure cloud storage account. Namecheap.com provides generic instructions for routing your URL to ANY cloud provider, and Microsoft offers generic instructions for creating DNS zone settings for URLs registered at ANY domain registrar, but no two domain name registrars and cloud platforms are the same. In other words, once you try to customize the settings for a specific Registrar-Cloud pair, the instructions can be frustrating. This article provides help for making your Namecheap.com URL work with your static Azure cloud website.

You may ask, “why not just buy the URL domain and website hosting from the same company, either Namecheap or Microsoft?” You can certainly do that, though Microsoft, as of this writing, does not sell domain name registrations. If you’ve hosted sites with WordPress or Shopify, you should know how this works. But what if, say six months later, you decide to switch hosting providers or the company goes out of business?

It’s a best practice to have your domain registrar separate from the hosting provider to avoid having one company monopolize your online presence. You can probably apply this help to other pairings, but you will likely encounter some hiccups along the way. But if simplicity is your number one goal, then it might be more convenient for you to have one company take care of everything for you. No need to read the rest of this article. But for those who already have a URL domain registered with one company (in this case, Namecheap.com) and are looking to host a website on another company’s cloud platform (in this case, Microsoft Azure).

Namecheap.com is my registrar, but most domain registrars work in similar ways. Without further ado, I will skip the verbosity and get right to it. The process of configuring your URL to work with your cloud account is as follows:

1. Have your URL domain registration info from Namecheap.com handy

2. In your cloud account portal, setup storage accounts for static websites

3. Configure your Azure cloud account so that your DNS configuration is ready to go with your DNS nameserver

Both Namecheap.com and Microsoft have tutorials to help you (links are provided). I won’t repeat the steps here. I suggest reading that now before continuing. I will focus on the details that are not so obvious that can frustrate you.

Read the rest here!

Synthetic Monitoring: Helpful Info for Web Developers, Architects and Admins

Every website requires some kind of real-time monitoring to stay abreast of changes to the production behavior of web applications at runtime. We all need to see how our websites hold up by simulating a customer clicking through our site pages and launching various transactions or complex requests. We also need to see how our apps respond when things go wrong. That’s what synthetic monitoring (aka active monitoring) helps with.

Microsoft‘s Technet Site has some helpful info. Here’s a snippet followed by a link for more detailed info:

In Operations Manager 2007, synthetic transactions are actions, run in real time, that are performed on monitored objects. You can use synthetic transactions to measure the performance of a monitored object and to see how Operations Manager reacts when synthetic stress is placed on your monitoring settings.

For example, for a Web site, you can create a synthetic transaction that performs the actions of a customer connecting to the site and browsing through its pages. For databases, you can create transactions that connect to the database. You can then schedule these actions to occur at regular intervals to see how the database or Web site reacts and to see whether your monitoring settings, such as alerts and notifications, also react as expected.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd440885.aspx

Wikipedia has the following info (click the link for more info):

Synthetic monitoring (also known as active monitoring) is website monitoring that is done using a web browser emulation or scripted real web browsers. Behavioral scripts (or paths) are created to simulate an action or path that a customer or end-user would take on a site. Those paths are then continuously monitored at specified intervals for performance, such as: functionality, availability, and response time measures.

Synthetic monitoring is valuable because it enables a webmaster to identify problems and determine if his website or web application is slow or experiencing downtime before that problem affects actual end-users or customers. This type of monitoring does not require actual web traffic so it enables companies to test web applications 24×7, or test new applications prior to a live customer-facing launch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_monitoring

Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application as expected. Website monitoring is often used by businesses to ensure website uptime, performance, and functionality is as expected.

Website monitoring companies provide organizations the ability to consistently monitor a website, or server function, and observe how it responds. The monitoring is often conducted from several locations around the world to a specific website, or server, in order to detect issues related to general Internet latency, network hop issues, and to pinpoint errors. Monitoring companies generally report on these tests in a variety of reports, charts and graphs. When an error is detected monitoring services send out alerts via email, SMS, phone, SNMP trap, pager that may include diagnostic information, such as a network trace route, code capture of a web page’s HTML file, a screen shot of a webpage,and even a video of a website failing. These diagnostics allow network administrators and webmasters to correct issues faster.

Monitoring gathers extensive data on website performance, such as load times, server response times, page element performance that is often analyzed and used to further optimize website performance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website_monitoring 

Best Practices for Active Response Time Monitoring by Chung Wu

First, unless carefully designed, the tests may not be representative of actual end user activities, reducing the usefulness of the measurements. Therefore, you must be very careful in defining those tests. It would be a good idea to sit down with real users to observe how they use the applications. If the application has not been launched, work with the developers, or if there is one, the UI interaction designer to define the flow. In addition, work with your business sponsors to understand where the application will be used and the distribution of user population. You would want to place your synthetic test drivers at locations where it is important to measure user experience.

Second, some synthetic transactions are very hard to create and may introduce noise into business data. While it is usually relatively easy to create query-based synthetic transactions, it is much harder to create transactions that create or update data. For example, if synthetic transactions are to test for successful checkouts on an e-commerce website, the tests must be constructed carefully so that the test orders are not mis-categorized as actual orders.

To mitigate these potential problems, you should set up dedicated test account(s) to make it easier to tell whether something running on the application came from real users or the synthetic tests…

Read the rest at http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/app-mgt-blog/best-practices-for-active-response-time-monitoring-23265 

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