InformationWeek

March 6, 2000

Content Delivery Needs Improved Management Tools

By Terry Sweeney

ontent delivery offers lots of benefits to Web sites of all sizes, but its potential can't be fully exploited without better management capabilities at affordable prices.

Almost all content-delivery services tap a third-party measurement service such as Keynote Systems or Service Metrix to tally data such as user origin, number of hits, and duration of transactions. Site performance is measured before and after content delivery is implemented, using these statistics as a baseline.

"We have clients that look at us through the Keynote filter, and we collect Keynote stats and feed

them into our algorithm and make sure it influences how we do content delivery," says Tim Wilson, VP of marketing for Digital Island Inc., a content-delivery provider. "But if you peel the onion on Keynote, you'll see you can do well on Keynote but not so well with the end user. The Keynote monitoring agents aren't always in the right place."

Another technique lets users download monitoring tools in the form of a Java applet into a user's PC or management console. The applet looks at the application and the platform it's running on and calculates overall system response. Such products already are available from Candle Corp. and BMC Software Inc.

Ken Ostermann, manager of interactive communications for Harley-Davidson Motor Co. in Milwaukee, uses Blue Martini Software Inc.'s enterprise reporting and clickstream-analysis product. "It lets us do data mining right out of the box and see which pages are fast, what's commonly viewed, who's looking at what, and what the characteristics of certain customers are as we go to login and registration of customers," he says.

Many users may find they have all the management tools they need if they're running Windows NT. Two sets of interfaces can be tapped on the NT server to capture processor and memory statistics to analyze real-time or after the fact, says Jordan Olin, chief technology officer of Computer.com Inc. in Maynard, Mass. With servers creating a record of such performance statistics, the numbers can be downloaded into a database separate from the NT environment for subsequent management analysis. Olin says he looked at network management systems from Cabletron, Computer Associates, and Hewlett-Packard. "I decided we could do the job with the tools on the operating system or with the switches we have, rather than spend $100,000 on a very pretty GUI," Olin says.

Vendors also try to make it all look easy and seamless with their marketing of management frameworks. "Everybody's got these great E-business services, but it all requires a huge up-front investment on our part," says Joe Dunnigan, president of Bigdeal.com in Phoenix. "Until these vendors can make it totally convenient and affordable for us, I'm going to have to pass on them."

Return to main story, "Content-Delivery Services Can Avert Traffic Jams."

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