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How Healthy Is Your Site? April 17, 2000 Keynote Systems MyKeynote With its large number of configurable and customizable components and excellent graphing, Keynote sits near the top of our list. Keynote's services range from simple Web-site monitoring to end-to-end consulting and auditing services. Like Service Metrics, this company can provide varying levels of help that fit nearly any budget. Keynote's signature feature is the numerous groups of agents it uses to collect data. Keynote's agents can be chosen from 50 metropolitan areas, to accurately emulate the type of traffic you expect. Dial-up and broadband users can be emulated to provide specific measurements of your site. Pricing varies but is quite reasonable, ranging from $249 to $1,495 per month per URL, depending on the number of agents used in collecting data. Other offerings, such as consulting services and specialized agents, are extra. MyKeynote's main page displays the monitored URLs and configurable indexes in graphs that depict the URLs' response times for the past 24 hours. The graph has hot spots at each data point, to allow quick identification of performance problems and details of that specific data point. We found the extensive configuration options and the customizable user-note sections helpful for quickly identifying problems or suspicious performance levels. Keynote's graphing features are richer and more refined than those of its competitors. For instance, only Keynote lets you click on the graph and zoom in. Using this drill-down feature, we zoomed into a section of a graph that showed slow response time for networkcomputing.com transactions. Once we isolated the slow portion of the graph, we could select the agent breakdown graph and see which of the Keynote agents specifically had a problem. Depending on the agent group you selected, you can switch to various graphs and get more detail. Like Service Metrics, Keynote provides a time-line feature called "Diagnostics" that, though tabular in presentation, is equally effective at revealing Web site-performance data. Keynote also provides feature-rich alert notification via e-mail. Configurable thresholds are present, though there is only a single group for all alerts, rather than Service Metrics' multiple group configuration. Alarms can be turned on and off for each URL and can be configured with URL-specific thresholds and tolerances. Alerts also are configured and sent out for individual groups of DCAs that show the exact problem to you for a specific group. For e-commerce sites or Web sites with targeted content--for example, all text or Macromedia Flash/non-Flash--this granular monitoring and reporting ability could prove invaluable. MyKeynote, Keynote Systems, (888) 539-6683, (650) 522-1000; fax (650) 522-1099. www.keynote.com or info@keynote.com
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