Why improve the alerting system of our QUANTA tool, will you ask? Simply to allow you to react more and more quickly and accurately to changes in the web performance of your website.

As we often say, without precise, immediate, and common to all your teams information, your website may see its conversion rate strongly impacted. And this information, the basis of all optimization strategies, must have an effective alerting system, as close as possible to your concerns.

So, to discover what Phase 2 has in store for you, … Just follow me!

A bag full of new settings: Alerting on the total time of web scenarios and alerting thresholds

Until today, QUANTA’s alerting system allowed you to be notified in the event of an incident on your website. For example, in the classic case of a site undergoing a downtime.

Now, the new alert feature on the execution time of web scenarios, and the setting of thresholds of so-called alerts pushes the concept even further.

First of all, this new feature notifies you when the execution time of your web scenarios exceeds a designated limit. You can configure this limit to compare the run time against a fixed threshold or the average time monitored over a given period of time (last 2 hours, last day, or last week).

Advanced settings detail – Alerting on the total time of web scenarios and alerting thresholds

In parallel with this, we added the possibility to configure alert sensitivity. You will now be able to choose:

• how many failures of the scenario will trigger an alert (ex: I receive an alert when the incident occurred more than 15 times in the span of 25 minutes),
• and how long it will take after the resolution of an incident for the associated issue to be considered as closed (ex: I no longer receive an alert when the scenario has run 20 times without incidents).

This new feature will allow you to mobilize your teams on all incidents that could affect your web performance, not just the most impressive ones.

A more precise analysis: Alerting schedule

The QUANTA analysis and monitoring tool is the co-pilot of your web performance. But to function optimally, it must be able to rely on accurate data. But if these data came to be polluted, you could find yourself under an avalanche of alerts unnecessarily alarming.

That’s why we’ve created this feature that lets you disable certain alerts at certain times of the day. This can be useful, for example, to disable alerts during your maintenance periods.

Advanced settings detail – Alerts scheduling

This feature, available in beta only, is accessible from the window for setting up alerts on the execution time of web scenarios.

If you wish to try this feature, don’t hesitate to contact us.

A more serene environment: Notifications schedule

With this new feature, you can now choose to stop receiving alerts at certain times of the day. This will allow you to no longer receive alerts on weekends, or at night.

Advanced settings detail – Notifications scheduling

However, do not panic! You will now receive an email summary of alerts that you may have missed, to stay informed at all times of everything that happened on your website.

As for the previous one, this new feature is only available in beta, so you’ll need to contact us if you’d like to try it.

There you go ! This is the end for this batch of new features for QUANTA’s Alerting settings! As usual, we are at your disposal if you want to know more, and we are always very interested in your feedbacks!

L’article What’s Up Quanta #14 – Phase 2 for the new Alerting system! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

The entire Quanta team has worked hard to offer you brand new features. So it was high time to talk about it. 😉 So here we go for the overview of the new alerting system, and of the latest profiler, the one for OroCommerce.

THE NEW ALERTING SYSTEM

As some of you may have already noticed in the app, we’re undertaking a major project to profoundly improve the QUANTA alerting system, making it ever more customizable and intuitive.

The first phase of this work has just ended and mainly concerned the “configuration of alerting” part, to make this crucial tool more fun to use.

So we built a new page specially dedicated to the subject, soberly called “Alerting”.

This tab of the app now allows you to:

• Configure your alerts with a simplified subscription form,
• Manage your (very) many alerts more easily,
• As well as register your teammates for alerts when you are in “administrator mode”.

New “Alerting” tab in QUANTA

Of course, all these actions are also possible for the Daily & Weekly Digests.

All this work of personalization on the alerting dashboard was accompanied by a complete overhaul of the system, to make it more scalable, which will allow us in the future to implement new functionalities more easily.

This work did not, of course, happen at random. This redesign was necessary to prepare for the “Phase 2”, which promises some surprises. We are indeed working on some new features that should be released in the weeks to come:

• Configuring custom thresholds alerts,
• And the possibility of now being warned when a web scenario exceeds a certain threshold of loading time (against an alert only in case of scenario error, currently).

We hope that these new features will please you, and please, do not hesitate to send us your remarks. 😉

THE ONE AND ONLY PROFILER FOR OROCOMMERCE

For those who follow the technological advances in the field of e-commerce, you surely have already heard about OroCommerce, the new CMS published by Oro, and destined to BtoB companies.

And for those who are also following the Quanta news, you must have heard that we released the very first OroCommerce profiler, designed to monitor the performance of this brand new platform.

Like our already well proven Magento 1 and Magento 2 profilers, our users now have a profiler that offers the same level of analysis for OroCommerce websites.

Analysis of the general performance of an OroCommerce website in the QUANTA app

This new profiler allows you to have an extra level of detail of analysis on all the e-commerce websites running on OroCommerce. It allows you to precisely identify the code blocks that have the greatest impact on OroCommerce’s web performance, and to track live the evolution of the application’s execution time.

Detailed analysis of the different loading times of an OroCommerce website in the QUANTA app

Detailed analysis of the blocks of an OroCommerce website in the QUANTA app

This new profiler is currently in beta. To use it, simply send an email to the support team, and we will gladly give you access to it. 🙂

So that’s it for this What’s Up Quanta # 11!

See you soon for other news about the new features for the QUANTA app, and do not hesitate to contact us for specific requests. We are always eager to hear good ideas to improve the app, and to always offer you more web performance!

L’article What’s Up Quanta #11 – A new alerting system and the famous OroCommerce profiler est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Why monitor an e-commerce website?

For those of you that, like us, are passionate about web performance and e-commerce, you should have seen lately that everybody is talking about the users’ cry for instantness.

E-customers don’t want to wait. If they can’t buy online in a timely manner, and on a website which offer great UX, they will simply leave.

You’ll thus have lost both a chance to sell, and a chance to establish your reputation. And we all know how much money it cost to attract new customer, instead of simply retaining your current ones…

That being said, if you want to reduce your loading times, increase your conversion, retain your customer, AND offer a great UX, then web performance should be your number 1 priority.

And to optimise your web performance, you need to carefully monitor your website. And not just the back-end (which means everything that is invisible to your users : server, response time, network, …etc.)! You need to keep an eye on your front-end (which means everything that is visible to your users : images, pages, links, tags, …etc.) also, to have a complete pictures of where your e-commerce platform could be optimised.

How does our front-end monitoring feature works?

Until recently, Quanta’s main focus was to offer precise, clear and constant back-end monitoring. It means that thanks to our app’s profilers and dashboards, you were able to monitor your back-end and keep track of any incident or slowdown that your server, network, databases, …etc. experienced.

With the front-end monitoring feature, you have the opportunity to analyse more thoroughly the web performance of each page of your e-commerce funnel.

Quanta’s probes now analyse the loading times of the front-end elements (images, CSS, JS, external tags, …etc.) on each of your pages.

Our waterfall view

Our waterfall view allows you to track down each resource loaded. As such, you know what happened, for how long, and when! Also, to help you identify the most important issues, we provide you with Google Pagespeed recommendations.

Waterfall of the category page

In other words, you can now discover which of your super heavy kitten image, or which JS line written by your freshly arrived intern, is jeopardizing your web performance and thus your revenue, AND take action right away to correct it.

Pretty neat, ha?

Results?

Some of our clients already tried it, and had mind-boggling results. Seriously.

The first place actually goes to Madura, who reduced its frontend page loading times by 20%, in just one week!

But we’ll soon do a Case Study on this subject, so stay tuned to read about the real life applications of this new feature.

L’article What’s Up Quanta #10 – Our Front-End monitoring is there! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

So, taking that into account, it seems to be a good idea to have some little tips to increase the web performance of an e-commerce website. And that’s when this blog post comes in handy.

Welcome to the third (and last) part in our 3 parts series, about the little knacks that you could implement to boost your Magento’s performance!!

This time, we’re gonna talk about 11 back-end tips for your Magento store, but if you want to learn more about the server knacks, or the front-end optimizations, just click on their respective links!

Without further ado, let’s quickly review together this list of back-end optimizations that you can easily implement for your Magento website!

• Install, or configure, different caching systems to avoid consuming too much resources. Good choices are: BlockCache (Magento), FullPageCache (Magento EE), Opcode Cache (PHP), which in its Zend Opcache version is configured by default in PHP 5.5, Varnish (Proxy cache), RAM Cache.
• Migrate your backoffice on another server to avoid performance issues during the connection.
• Disable and uninstall extensions you don’t use.
• Use Magento “Flat Catalog” functionalities to avoid accessing several table in SQL at the same time.
• Avoid using Magento “Layered Navigation” functions since they are energy-greedy.
• Forget about obfuscation (e.g. loncube) in your PHP code: It will open two times more classic files and have a huge impact on your performance.
• Limit the number of products on your front-end pages, which require a lot of requests/server performance.
• Disable Magento logs.
• Activate Magento Cron’s maintenance scripts.
• Use a RAM Cache system for sessions.
• Install a tool like Fasterize or Cloudflare.

Remember that depending on your architecture, your hosting and/or your server, these solutions could bring disappointing results. That is why a monitoring tool could help you to prioritize the best-suited optimizations for you.

But if everything goes according to plan, applying these principles will let you experience a significant improvement in page loading times.

This list, of course, is not exhaustive. But it’s a start 😉 Feel free to contact us if you have any other performance-related tips to share with us!

And check out our 2 other blog post on Magento’s optimizations:

• 14 server knacks to optimize your Magento store’s performance!
• 9 front-end pro tips to optimize your Magento store’s performance!

L’article 11 ways to optimize the performance of your Magento store’s back office! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Today, we’re gonna talk about 9 front-end tips for your Magento store, but if you want to learn more about the server knacks that you can implement, just follow the lead.

So. As we’ve said before, web performance is key when managing an e-commerce website. The speed of an online store is crucial for conversion and SEO, and thus profitability. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again 😉

Without further ado, let’s quickly review together this list of front-end optimizations that you can easily make for your Magento website!

1. 1. Be careful with the order of your assets. For example, Javascript files block the download of the pages. So you should therefore place them at the lowest level possible. Because, even though our navigators are getting smarter, you can always gain some improvements from avoiding loading time.
   2. More requests = more loading time, so limit their number by using: concatenation (Gather your CSS/JS file together in a single file), CSS sprites (thus combining several images into one), parallelization (For this, you can distribute your assets into several domains. But not too many! Calculate DNS lookup time to make sure that you are not working at cross-purposes. Or you can also use a CDN).
   3. Use minification. It reduces the weight of the useless elements of your assets (e.g empty space, comments…).
   4. Use async directives as much as possible for your Javascript files.
   5. Use DNS Prefetch directives to avoid using too much of your browser’s resources.
   6. Delete unused Magento blocks (layout.xml).
   7. Use browser’s cache for static files.
   8. Compress your pictures.
   9. Adapt the width/height/weight of your pictures, in accordance with your users’ connection.

Remember that depending on your architecture, your hosting and/or your server, these solutions could bring disappointing results. That is why a monitoring tool could help you to prioritize the best-suited optimizations for you.

But if everything goes according to plan, applying these principles will let you experience a significant improvement in page loading times.

This list, of course, is not exhaustive. But it’s a start 😉 Feel free to contact us if you have any other performance-related tips to share with us!

And check out our 2 other blog post on Magento’s optimizations:

1. • 14 server knacks to optimize your Magento store’s performance!
   • 11 ways to optimize the performance of your Magento store’s back office! [Coming soon!]

L’article 9 front-end pro tips to optimize your Magento store’s performance! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Web performance is key when managing an e-commerce website. Indeed, as you may already know, the speed of an online store is crucial for conversion, and thus profitability. Customers are less and less prone to wait for a page to load, when purchasing online. Conversely, users are very likely to make an impulse buy if your website is fast, since speed improves user experience.

But it’s not just because of conversion that web performance should be a main focus point of yours. There is also the little matter of SEO that has to be taken into account. Indeed, Google takes into account your website’s speed to build its index: the fastest your website is, the more likely you will be to find your website at the top of the search results, and thus, attract new visitors.

However, if Magento remains the leading e-commerce solution on the market, it has a reputation of being quite slow (well… Not as slow as PrestaShop, WooCommerce, and Open Cart, but still… :P), thus making it essential to optimize said Magento-run websites.

So, let’s quickly review together today this list of server optimizations for a Magento-based e-commerce website!

• Get a dedicated server, and allocate enough resources to it.
• Check that you have an architecture adapted to your needs.
• Disable or lower logs servers (it can impact Disk I/O).
• Reduce the physical distance between your customers and your website by: Bringing servers closer to your customers (kind of like the little surprise that QUANTA is preparing in Asia… 😉 ), and Using a CDN.
• Use a reverse proxy to avoid using PHP-capable workers to handle slow clients, serve static files, …etc.
• Use PHP-FPM: It does an awesome job as a PHP worker pool and it’s the best way to have an efficient Opcache.
• Use KeepAlive directives to manage several sessions on competition on a single TCP connection.
• Activate Gzip compression.
• Update your applications (e.g Nginx, MySQL) on a regular basis.
• Optimize MySQL performance.
• Install APC to speed up your code execution time.
• Disable the Apache/Nginx modules you don’t need.
• Uninstall debugging libraries (e.g xdebug, zend debugger).
• Use SSD hard drives.

Remember that depending on your architecture, your hosting and/or your server, these solutions could bring disappointing results. That is why a monitoring tool could help you to prioritize the best-suited optimizations for you.

But if everything goes according to plan, applying these principles will let you experience a significant improvement in page loading times.

This list, of course, is not exhaustive. But it’s a start 😉 Feel free to contact us if you have any other performance-related tips to share with us!

L’article 14 server knacks to optimize your Magento store’s performance! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

We may have brought you new features, just two weeks ago, but it’s not enough for us! We aim at a constant improvement of our monitoring tool, through cutting edge technology.

So, even if you’ve already read about our Business and Favorites dashboards, just take a few minutes to discover our new profilers for PHP 7 and Magento!

New profiler QUANTA for PHP 7

PHP 7 brought huge performance improvements compared to the earlier versions, and is used more and more by e-commerce websites. So it only felt natural for us to make our PHP module compatible with this new shiny PHP release.

My team and I worked very hard to quickly bring you this new release, and I’m really proud to announce that it is just out!

To begin using our new profiler for PHP 7.0, just install it using your package manager:

• If you’re using Debian or Ubuntu: apt-get install php70-quanta-mon
• If you’re using Centos or Redhat: yum install php70-quanta-mon

Of course, you’ll need to configure your system to use our repository, prior to this step. But don’t panic! You’ll find all the technical details in our knowledge base, and we’re always just a mail away if you need any more help. 😉

New profiler QUANTA for Magento 2 CE and EE

The Magento team released a brand new version of their e-commerce CMS on November 2015, which is a total rewrite of the Magento 1.X codebase. It offers awesome new features for developers and e-commerce directors!

Some of you have already started the migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2, so we decided to prioritize our roadmap around a Magento 2 compatibility.

After a few months of coding, testing, private beta, more coding, … etc., we decided that our new profiler was finally ready to be released! So, we pressed the red button, and included it in our latest 1.2.X profiler release. If you’ve switched to Magento 2, or plan to do it, just upgrade your PHP module to enjoy this new features.

Improvement on the profiler QUANTA for Magento 1 EE

It’s been almost 6 months since we released our first PHP module for Magento 1.X. And we used this time to deal with the few glitches and shortcomings we discovered, thanks to your really valuable feedback.

We clearly saw that the compatibility with Magento EE could be improved in various ways. So, here are the “new” features we worked on:

• Better Magento event handling: The PHP module is now able to detect events generated by running scripts from the command-line, and that includes scheduled tasks like those specified in your crontab. Before our improvements, we were able to detect events generated from the backoffice (for example when you clicked on the scary “clear Magento cache” button), but it turns out that, that wasn’t enough to have a good representation of what’s happening behind the scenes.
• More timers: Most of Magento EE websites rely heavily on the FPC (Full Page Cache) feature to improve performance. So we thought that the time spent to fetch data from this cache would be a very valuable metric to provide you with. We added a timer around the FPC processing (and a few other less important ones as you might already have noticed) in our latest profiler release. I hope you’ll find it useful !

Those improvements, and the new Magento 2 compatibility, were also the opportunity for us to rethink our codebase and make it easier to change in the future. This refactoring will allow us to add compatibility with other CMS more easily in the future, so don’t be surprised if we come up with a Drupal profiler in the next few weeks !

L’article What’s Up Quanta #8 – Profilers and Compatibility est apparu en premier sur Quanta.