InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Although analysts estimate that fewer than 5% of Internet sites use any of these monitoring and management services today, more than 20% 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 get 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 may also 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.

The best-established services are those that don't require site software but send automated agents across the Internet to contact sites and determine whether preselected pages are available and how long they take to load. The major players in this arena do more than ping, however: They download the page and provide metrics, such as time frame for domain name system resolution, connection setup, first byte received, redirect delays, and base-page download. Site managers then set alert thresholds to determine what level of degradation merits E-mail or pager notification. Last year, an 8-second download time per page was considered acceptable. Today, the average is closer to 5 to 7 seconds. In most instances, reporting occurs every 15 minutes.

Keynote and Freshwater can adjust the interval to every minute, while Service Metrics can go down to about every 4 minutes. These services help IS managers make decisions on issues such as whose backbone to use and in which cities to locate content. Similarly, service providers have used such companies to track down major performance bottlenecks--for example, problematic Internet backbone peering points--and to establish service-level agreements with their Web-hosting customers.