Why Performance Monitoring?

In understanding Service Levels for Web Sites, moving quickly to how to measure for SLAs, we quickly turn to Performance Monitoring to see how a web site is doing. In Avinash's book, "Web Analytics An Hour A Day", he describes the Web Analytics trinity, a framework for understanding "Why customers visit", "Who actually visits", and "What Happens when they visit". I propose to expand the trinity to "How is the Web Site Doing?" and that is why we use performance monitoring.

The critical issue not found with Web Analytics is the critical metric of Time. "How are we doing?" easily goes to "When did it Happen?" Most web analysis does not account for time, since the insights are more strategic in nature. Performance Monitoring is more operational in nature to provide valuable insight into how the site is reacting "Right Now".