“Your monitoring tool is the right one the business needed.”

LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor is a leading UK-based community pharmacy and healthcare provider with 1,300 pharmacies across the UK. LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor provides online access to doctors, offering treatment and prescription medicine to patients in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

Uptrends got the opportunity to sit down with Slawek Dejneka, IT Infrastructure and Operations Manager at LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor to talk about how Uptrends’ Synthetic Monitoring solutions help keep their extensive e-commerce network running smoothly.

Challenges

As a patient-centric healthcare business, LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor offers a range of products and services to its patients through its website and mobile app.

To keep pace with the high volume of transactions processed annually, they wanted a transaction monitoring solution that could provide detailed, real-user data and work in conjunction with an existing monitoring system they already had in place. They needed a tool that could monitor the pathway their patients took from browsing their site leading up to eventually making transactions for prescriptions and medical services.

“We’ve been looking for a solution which will allow us, independent of our internal monitoring tool, to monitor our systems from the outside and track exactly what users visiting our website were experiencing.”

Solution

To this end, LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor relies on Uptrends’ Synthetic Monitoring technology, with its full suite of comprehensive monitoring tools, to ensure patients receive the site availability and performance LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor is known for providing.

Uptrends' Transaction Recorder, in particular, proved to be beneficial to test core functions like logins and signup flows. Recording critical transactions directly in the browser using Uptrends' Transaction Recorder provides the visibility the online healthcare provider was looking for to ensure end users can actually use its website, with little or no disruption, time after time and from multiple locations.

Building and editing scripts with the code-free editor offered the team a simple but effective way to record and monitor shopping carts, payment providers, forms, and logins trouble-free.

“That was greatly beneficial for us to monitor transactions being done this way using the recorder. It was especially useful and quite easy to build the whole transaction.”

APIs are more than ever becoming essential components of e-commerce business worldwide. Developers and business owners understand the importance of having a rock-solid API strategy in place to give them a competitive advantage. Over 68% of developers expect to rely on them in 2022. They are the glue connecting dozens of e-commerce-related technologies. APIs provide a number of important benefits necessary to success, including cross-integration of platforms, enhanced security, scalability and more.

LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor looked to Uptrends’ API Monitoring for precisely those reasons. Uptrends is well-known for its ability to provide its clients with the resources to build comprehensive API scenarios — setting up multiple HTTP requests, verifying API functionality, timely alerts, rapid escalations and more.

“We use Uptrends to monitor our cloud- based API based applications. We run a number of test calls every couple of minutes to the API endpoints.”

More and more, e-commerce customers don’t reside in one city, one country or even one geographic region. That’s why Uptrends monitors APIs from over 233 global checkpoints. With Concurrent Monitoring, IT professionals can test from several locations simultaneously.

“Your monitoring tool is the right one the business needed. The information provided is detailed, which we required for our internal purposes to assess our performance and to see on which occasions we may have potential problems.”

Business impact/Results

LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor is committed to delivering the highest quality care for its patients and must ensure high availability of its online services.

Uptrends’ Synthetic Monitoring package provides LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor with ironclad monitoring coverage to ensure its patients receive the high-quality healthcare products and services they need. A key partner of the UK National Health Service, Lloyds Pharmacy Online Doctor also works closely with local healthcare providers to develop and deliver commissioned services to address specific health needs within communities

They had a variety of other monitoring options available to it, but they chose Uptrends based on its service, reputation, and product offering, which have been demonstrated over and over again to be highly reliable and cost-effective.

Not wanting to ditch their internal monitoring system altogether, they looked to Uptrends to provide a completely independent overview of what their patients were seeing when interacting with their e-commerce platform. Uptrends' Transaction Monitoring and API Monitoring tools covered those bases with continuous automated testing to monitor changing circumstances, such as failing resources, network issues, availability of underlying database, expired security credentials, and more.

Uptrends’ Synthetic Monitoring tools are also benefiting LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor by providing options for setting up client certificates as part of its Multi-step API Monitoring tool — useful for adherence to SLAs and compliance issues regarding management of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

“We pride ourselves on offering our patients the absolute best service, which means being available 24/7 and that our IT systems and network infrastructure must be robust and reliable. We pick the best tools available to help us keep our patients healthy and happy.”

Backed by the power and scalability of Uptrends Synthetic Monitoring suite, LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor has the tools to monitor many of the business-critical steps along the patient journey now and into the future if and when it decides to expand its service into other markets.