Business Impact of good website and infrastructure monitoring

There is a direct relationship between website availability, customer satisfaction and revenue.

In my roles leading infrastructure for Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com) and as CIO at Lieberman Research Worldwide, I have worked with the HP/Mercury Interactive Business Availability Center and Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to get real-time feedback on customer online experience and correlate issues to underlying infrastructure and application architecture. My interest first began in the early days of the Internet when customers of Barnes & Noble.com stopped calling customer service if there was a website issue, they just clicked www.amazon.com.

There is a direct relationship between well architected monitoring and minimizing mean time to repair (MTTR).

It is not sufficient to implement monitoring to see system alerts or to monitor components of the infrastructure independently (network, databases, applications). It is common practice in less mature organizations for developers to send emails to themselves as the sole alerting mechanism if there are application errors. The challenge of independent monitoring approaches is that there may not be sufficient information to understand what a problem is or to prioritize issues with respect to business impact. IT energy is saved, problems are solved faster, and monitoring is not "over-implemented" if the architecture is thought out and the process of updating monitoring is integrated with the SDLC. What is your experience?