Nevertheless, SiteSeer fits well into tight budgets thanks to its low price: a little more than $6 per URL per month, or $1,495 for 20 URLs a year.

Although it's not pretty, SiteSeer's lightweight interface loaded quickly and got us running in no time. Like the other services we tested, the main page listed the URLs we were monitoring and described each one's performance with a brief status indicator and a colored LED-like graphic. Detailed views and summaries of monitored URLs, as well as reports, alerts, and log information are accessible from the main page.

SiteSeer offers detailed options for configuring how its agents will interact with your Web content. These options include proxy configuration, content checking, and user authentication. The user can also indicate which agents will gather data. The agents aren't as widespread as Keynote's or Service Metrics', but they are geographically dispersed across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

SiteSeer's monitor-configuration options are slightly more flexible than WebPartner's. For example, monitors can be configured to change from "error," "warning," or "good" based on various metrics. These include time measurements such as round-trip time, HTTP return code, content matching, and percentages of each in respect to successes and failures.

Data is displayed first in tabular form. These tables' use of color to represent good, average, and poor performance helped us quickly identify issues with our Web site's performance. It's possible to generate graphical reports from the initial tables, but they lack the features Keynote and Service Metrics provide. Reports contain a summary of performance information across the top for quick indication of overall site performance. There is no way to compare performance of one URL with another, short of eyeballing previously generated graphs.

SiteSeer's Alerts, which use an "if x, then y" configuration form, are more difficult to use than those of Keynote and Service Metrics. Alerts are configurable per URL and can be sent via E-mail, pager, or Simple Network Management Protocol trap. E-mail alerts and reports are similar to those of Evity and WebPartner in construction but contain more information in terms of measured quantities, such as specific timings for every portion of an HTTP transaction.

WebPartner's SecretShopper service has an extremely low price--$179 to $349 annually for five URLs--but you won't get more than basic levels of performance data, analysis, and reporting. That may be enough for some organizations, but if you're looking for more refined, granular reporting and analysis, you'll be disappointed. WebPartner's SecretShopper is much less configurable than Freshwater's, Keynote's, and Service Metrics' offerings. Reports and alerts are nowhere near as complete and comprehensive as those of SecretShopper's competitors.

WebPartner's service is easy to use and navigate. And although the service is relatively simple, it offers the features necessary to interpret and report on the data it has gathered.

Like Keynote and Service Metrics, SecretShopper provides competitive numbers for groups of URLs. Reports can be generated to compare your monitored URLs with the WebPartner 100--a list of 100 major Internet sites--or directly with other WebPartner-monitored URLs. Charts are easy to read, with large legends and high-contrast colors. WebPartner actually makes it a bit easier to see numbers and compare URLs using the graphs than do Keynote and Service Metrics.

Beyond presentation, SecretShopper shows its limitations: The graphs have no drill-down capability, and URL components are not broken down into "A HREF" instances and grouped under content type. Sites can be monitored every 15 minutes. Only Evity monitors less frequently, and all services offer some configurable monitoring frequencies. Power users will want something more sophisticated.

Reports are distributed weekly to a configurable number of E-mail addresses. Although these reports con-tain little graphical eye candy and no charts, they do relate important site-performance data effectively in spreadsheet form. Statistics include availability, response time, transfer time, and a summary of problems detected according to your configuration criteria.