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How Healthy Is Your Site? April 17, 2000 By Christine Hudgins Imagine a store with automatic doors that won't open, aisles so jammed you can't see the shelves, cash registers that don't work and clerks that direct you to the wrong location. That business wouldn't survive long on Main Street. Like their brick-and-mortar counterparts, online merchants and suppliers are discovering that they can't sustain virtual businesses fraught with major outages, slow performance, content errors and broken transactions. The ad dollars spent on e-commerce may have gone up 1,400 percent last year, but poor performance is a big reason visitor-to-customer conversion rates remain flat. What's needed is operational discipline. While software products have traditionally filled that need, this year marks a subscription-service revolution. New services, designed to monitor, diagnose and manage Web site performance and usability, are emerging almost weekly. Their special appeal is tied to many factors: new and understaffed e-commerce ventures; users who want to test services as a prelude to buying products; and managers who'd rather not gamble on volatile, unstandardized performance products. In addition, there are inherent economies in going to a service provider to measure performance across a global Internet. Even as these new services emerge, they're morphing and partnering to include new management categories and metrics. Ultimately, this wild river of e-metrics will consolidate; within the year, some will begin to feed into more traditional management systems, such as those offered by BMC Software, Computer Associates International, Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. For now, though, we can roughly categorize some of the standout providers by the services for which they are most well-known:
Although analysts estimate that fewer than 5 percent of Internet sites use any of these monitoring and management services today, more than 20 percent are expected to do so by year's end. The services that prevail in the coming coalescence will be those that make it easy for IT to dive to the root cause of problems and provide advance warning. Interfaces to existing management systems will become increasingly important. Companies that offer software as well as services also may have an edge because larger sites may want to do their own site management while using a consistent service that furnishes information about extranet supplier sites or Internet-specific metrics (see "Site Monitoring: The Next Wave,".)
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