Integrations Monitoring 101

Just imagine: Your business is posting strong digital commerce results week after week and month after month. More and more consumers are coming to your site and purchasing products. Then, one day, disaster strikes: Someone realizes that the online payment integration your company uses has stopped working. Nobody can buy your products online and thousands, maybe millions of dollars are being lost.

The C-suite will have questions. When will this be fixed? How long has it been broken? How did it happen? Could we have avoided the problem altogether?

Knowing the answers to these questions – or better yet, preventing them from being asked – requires an effective integrations monitoring strategy. Learn about the basics of integrations monitoring, the importance of integrations, and why integrations monitoring is essential to Composable Commerce success.

What is Integrations Monitoring?

Integrations monitoring is the practice of monitoring the activity, status, and effectiveness of your business’s installed integrations.

Effective integrations monitoring includes a centralized hub of real-time data and details about your business’s integrations. Done well, integrations monitoring gives you the ability to gauge whether your business’s technology services are performing as intended.

What Are Commerce Integrations?

Broadly, business integrations are about taking a software or technology and syncing it with your business’s information and architecture. In commerce specifically, integrations are pivotal to delivering a strong customer experience that improves conversion rates and increases revenue.

eCommerce integrations are a necessity for most merchandisers. Building your own technology for site search, payments, marketing automation, fulfillment, and other digital commerce components is expensive and unwieldy. Instead, it’s standard to contract vendors, such as Stripe for payments and Algolia for search to power a digital commerce solution.

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Why is Integrations Monitoring So Important?

Integrations monitoring is important because while integrations can help you power a unique commerce experience for customers, you need to be sure that they’re providing you a high degree of service.

Whether you’re using an ESB architecture, APIs, or an iPaaS, integrations monitoring tells you whether your commerce solution is working and allows you to act fast when changes are necessary.

A strong integrations monitoring platform will include:

• Dashboards, which serve as a centralized hub for information about all your integrations
• Metrics, so that you know the exact stats and performance of your integrations
• Logs, which are code-based messages that provide debugging instructions in case of issues
• Event tracking, so that you can see the history of integrations
• Alerts, which tell you immediately and in real-time when one or more of your integrations is malfunctioning or needs to be serviced

With these capabilities, you’ll be able to manage and operate integrations that advance your business goals. Without them, you’ll risk having an integrations meltdown that could alienate your customers and cost you revenue.

What Does Integrations Monitoring Have to Do With Composable Commerce?

As more brands adopt a Composable Commerce approach, they find themselves enjoying the benefits of a best-of-breed commerce solution that is reflective of their business needs and specific digital commerce vision.

Achieving a best-of-breed Composable Commerce solution is impossible without integrations, and unlikely to be sustainable or successful without integrations monitoring.

After all, a challenge of Composable Commerce is managing an architecture that includes multiple Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. How will you know which of these solutions is performing and which needs to be tweaked or replaced?

The answer may be Composer, the only commerce-intelligent iPaaS on the market. One of Composer’s capabilities is Monitor, an holistic management layer that provides unified integrations monitoring including log monitoring, event tracking, and alerts.

Monitor serves as an operational control panel for commerce leaders. Your DevOps team will have a centralized, unified platform through which to view and manage integrations. You’ll have access to integration-by-integration level insights and metrics, and if you’re a Composable Commerce XA™ customer, our team will observe your Monitor dashboards and alerts and intervene fast to support if necessary.

If you want to try the strongest integrations monitoring tool on the market, get in touch with our commerce experts to schedule a tutorial.