Web portals, such as e-commerce, student, and financial portals, secure sensitive content and transactions behind login screens. Monitoring the authenticated sections is important to ensure a seamless user experience as many vital interactions occur only after users log in. Proper monitoring verifies that login flows and subsequent user journeys are functioning reliably and without interruption.
Without proper monitoring, issues like session timeouts, login failures, or broken transactional flows often go unnoticed until users report them, leading to frustrated customers, lost sales, increased support tickets, and damage to your brand's reputation. For example, failing to detect a login failure or any other issue during a high-traffic sale could directly impact your revenue.
Challenges of not monitoring sessions or websites with authentication
Websites face significant issues when login sessions with authentication aren’t appropriately monitored:
User experience issues
When sessions expire, users are forced to log out, transactions are disrupted, and form submissions and workflow progress are affected. This leads to cart abandonment and lost conversions.
Login errors or blocked access due to failures in token refresh processes or unsupported multi-factor authentication (MFA) steps lead to increased support requests and the erosion of user trust.
Permission misconfigurations or silent authentication failures can make pages or features inaccessible, damaging the brand's reputation.
Security risks
Without monitoring, an unusual increase in failed login attempts or suspicious activity requiring immediate intervention can go unnoticed, delaying incident detection and response and increasing the organization's vulnerability. Moreover, inadequate logging of authentication events undermines audit trails, regulatory compliance, and forensic investigations, significantly escalating operational and security risks. With real-time monitoring, threats can be identified immediately, thereby helping organizations maintain security, compliance, and resilience.
Operational challenges
Session data loss, improper sharing across sessions, and failing to invalidate sessions upon logouts create inconsistencies, resulting in security and usability gaps. Authentication failures often disrupt downstream systems, like dashboards, checkout flows, and account management features, amplifying the impact and delaying diagnosis and resolution. Undetected authentication issues exacerbate operational costs due to user support escalations and lost revenue opportunities during critical peak times like sales events or product launches.
How Site24x7 helps
Site24x7 solves the challenges above by securely storing credentials and executing scripted login workflows, including token-based authentication and MFA. It continuously monitors the availability, performance, authentication and key user journeys such as form submissions and profile updates.
Additionally, Site24x7 encrypts sensitive data to uphold security compliance, supports MFA, and masks confidential information during monitoring. Its real-time alerts informed by detailed diagnostics empower your team to pinpoint the root cause of issues quickly and resolve them before users encounter them.
Use case: Monitoring banking websites with authentication
In the banking sector, where highly sensitive data and critical transactions are protected behind secure login portals, continuous monitoring of authenticated websites is necessary. These authenticated environments host confidential financial information, transactional data, and regulatory compliance obligations that demand seamless, uninterrupted access and strong security.
Monitoring these authenticated portals helps banks ensure that login flows and subsequent user activities—such as fund transfers, loan applications, and appointment scheduling—function flawlessly. Hiccups like session timeouts, authentication errors, or broken transaction workflows can lead to lost revenue, compromised customer data, and noncompliance with regulatory requirements.
With a monitoring tool like Site24x7, you can address these critical challenges by securely managing credentials and simulating complex login workflows, including MFA with time-based one-time passwords, OAuth, NTLM, and token-based authentication. A continuous monitoring solution tracks the availability, performance, and transactional accuracy of key user journeys behind authentication, such as online banking transfers, loan approvals, and appointment bookings. Moreover, sensitive data is encrypted and masked during monitoring to maintain compliance with the PCI DSS.
How Site24x7 monitors authenticated websites
Site24x7 securely stores credentials and supports various authentication methods. By using scripted workflows, it simulates real user login journeys, including multi-step authentication like entering one-time passcodes. It refreshes tokens automatically and masks sensitive data during monitoring for enhanced security and compliance.
Once the authentication is done, Site24x7 continuously monitors the availability,, performance, and authentication of the pages and workflows, such as form submissions, shopping carts, and profile updates. Detailed diagnostics, root cause analysis, and visual recordings like screenshots and videos enable quick issue resolution. In the event of authentication failures, session disruptions, or performance degradation, Site24x7 sends real-time alerts, facilitating proactive remediation before users are affected.
Site24x7 transforms website authentication monitoring from a technical challenge into a decisive competitive edge for businesses.