4 IT Optimization Use Cases and How to Implement Them

Website A/B testing and optimization tools usually fall under the domain of marketers and product managers, meaning IT gets saddled with a tool that can slow down site performance or mess with reporting. That should never be the case. Optimization and A/B testing should have distinct benefits for IT. SiteSpect is built differently; rather than depending on JavaScript tags to create variations, it is a highly scaled search and replace platform. Because of its unique architecture, SiteSpect offers a number of IT specific use cases to improve your metrics, workflow, and performance. In this blog, I’ll walk through 4 specific IT use cases with SiteSpect, and how they may fit into your ecosystem.

1. Hot Fixes

It’s a reality of the job that no matter how skilled you are, sometimes things break. But, those fixes take time, require development, and probably a release — which could then cause more problems or have unexpected and unforeseen effects. With SiteSpect implemented, you can push a temporary fix immediately (talking minutes) while you put a permanent fix into production. You can also A/B test those fixes on actual, live traffic before you deploy them in the code.

2. Monitoring Latency and Errors

You’re always monitoring and improving site speed, including Time to First Byte, Time to Last Byte, and Render Time. With SiteSpect set up, you can more easily monitor and identify any latency or errors. For example, you can quickly detect a slow origin, you can see clearly whether another third-party tool impacts Time to First Byte or any end user metrics, and you can see the space between APM server-side monitoring and RUM client-side monitoring.

3. Infrastructure Deployments

SiteSpect lets you retain control of your traffic, plus gives you the ability to more quickly manage or make changes to traffic flow. You might want to move traffic between different parts of your infrastructure, A/B test deployment of new classes of servers or software (and measure the results), or A/B test updates to load balancing before deploying. That agility gives you power over your traffic management and performance.

4. Application Feature Flag Activation

When you deploy new features with SiteSpect, you can A/B test them on small subsets of traffic and collect precise metrics before serving them to all traffic. With new releases you have the power to enable application features based on a targeted user profile, or progressively rollout features while monitoring business and performance KPIs.

Don’t let your colleagues in marketing or product management choose an optimization tool that interferes with your IT efforts. For more information on SiteSpect and how it works with you, check out our new ebook, The IT Manager’s Guide to SiteSpect Cloud.

To learn more about SiteSpect, visit our website.