Billy Hoffman's Blog Posts

Billy Hoffman

For over 15 years Billy has spoken internationally at conferences and written 2 books on how to build fast and secure websites. While CTO at Rigor, Billy on helped customers create strong performance cultures and understand the importance of performance to the business. Following Rigor's acquisition by Splunk, Billy focuses on improving and integrating the capabilities of Splunk's APM, RUM, and Synthetics products.

Learn 11 Min Read

What Is Synthetic Monitoring?

The goal of synthetic monitoring: Understand how a real user might experience your website. Let's go deep to see the great things synthetic monitoring can do.

Learn 8 Min Read

What Are Preload Resource Hints?

Explore preload resource hints, a powerful optimization method that can significantly improve web performance, user experience and related metrics.

Learn 5 Min Read

What Are Preconnect Resource Hints?

Improve time-to-interactive with preconnect resource hints. This article explores preconnects, why and how to use them, and best practices for scaling.

Learn 6 Min Read

What Is a DNS Prefetch?

Understand DNS prefetching, one type of resource hint, including what they are, why and how to use them, and best practices for auditing and scaling.

Learn 3 Min Read

Synthetic Monitoring vs Real User Monitoring: What’s The Difference?

Both RUM and synthetic monitoring are useful for managing the performance of websites and applications, and the two methodologies work well when paired together.

DevOps 5 Min Read

What the Fastly Outage Can Teach Us About Observability

In this blog post, we discuss the recent Fastly outage, examine how traditional monitoring technologies would have responded to that outage, and show how adopting Digital Experience Monitoring inside your Observability practice is crucial to detecting and responding to these types of issues.