InformationWeek

The need for Web performance-monitoring tools is growing as businesses conduct more of their sales and service functions online. An E-commerce site that doesn't deliver a top-notch customer experience isn't likely to stay in business. Broken links, slow-loading pages, major outages, and transaction errors will drive traffic to other sites.

IT departments need to establish operational procedures for monitoring the behavior of business Web sites and implement the tools necessary to carry out these maintenance chores. Web administrators have the choice of software tools or subscription-based services that monitor the well-being of corporate Web sites.

In this review, we look at five performance-monitoring services. To find out how well they performed, we let them loose on some of our favorite URLs. To sign up for each service, we filled out online forms at each vendor's site. There, we configured appropriate numbers of monitors or agents to poll the URLs every 15 to 30 minutes.

The evaluation of each service concentrated on the configuration of the monitors, the information gathered, and the quality of the reports and E-mail alerts generated throughout the month of testing. All five services provided access to service information via the Web.

Our test setup could not accommodate software-based services that required modifications to our servers. In fact, for many Web sites, it would be unheard of to unnecessarily modify anything in a production environment. Other companies may welcome more-intrusive monitoring for the sake of more-comprehensive statistics. We won't try to influence your position on this matter. However, we chose only those services that are agnostic to a Web site's infrastructure.

Our tests concentrated on each service's ability to monitor and report on Web-site performance. The five vendors monitored our designated sites from remote locations across the network. We focused on each service's monitoring, analysis, ease of use, notifications, and overall perceived value.

In the end, Service Metrics Inc.'s extremely flexible and easy-to-use reporting and monitoring features brought its SM-Web 2.1 service to the top. Keynote's MyKeynote service has equally compelling features, but falls slightly behind in ease of use. The offerings from Evity, Freshwater, and WebPartner are less flexible than those of the front-runners. Although Service Metrics and Keynote are a head above the rest, we recommend you watch all five companies. Their network infrastructures and user interfaces change almost daily.

Our tests revealed substantial differences in the services' maturity and quality. All five services required nothing more than filling out short online forms for each monitored URL, and they all provided lots of information on our Web site. But their tools for in-depth analysis varied widely. Service Metrics and Keynote provided the best analysis tools and reports. Although Evity SiteAngel 2000 presents a somewhat different paradigm (it monitors the speed and availability of the components of an Internet transaction), it was more useful and comprehensive than the services from WebPartner and Freshwater.

Price matters, but value is critical. We measured price in terms of overall perceived value, weighing features and service abilities with the cost.

Service Metrics SM-Web 2.1, an Exodus Communications Inc. property, offers the widest range of services of this group, including real-time performance analysis, transaction-oriented performance, overall site-performance monitoring, and professional consulting services for comprehensive analysis and diagnostics of Web-site performance. The company's SM-Web 2.1 is an effective and valuable service. Service Metrics' pricing ranges from $495 to $1,000 a month per URL, comparable to Keynote's pricing.

SM-Web 2.1's interface is more intuitive than Keynote's. The main interface uses tabs that guide you to the four sections: Administer, Analyze, Monitor, and Resources. The Administer page shows all configured URLs being monitored and graphically illustrates the site's performance and configuration options. Throughout the Web page, icons point to detailed information located within the other tabs. Pluses include the ability to configure global preferences and to use two or more user accounts to restrict access to configuration and monitoring pages.