September 25, 2000

Printer ready

Web-Site Monitoring Derails Problems

By Billie Shea

Need a tech term defined?

Send Us Your Feedback

esolving performance issues can be very frustrating. Take, for example, a hypothetical company that has labored through its due diligence to optimize system performance. System architects have created a solid design, substantial investments have been made in the purchase and tuning of the hardware components, everything has been adequately tested, and yet there are still users that complain about poor performance. Where does the real problem lie?

William Sullivan, principal and chief software engineer with Wham Engineering and Software Inc., a company that provides server performance-management products and consulting, refers to this problem as "the last half mile" or "the last 15 feet" to describe chronically poor connectivity issues at a user location.

"In this scenario, the issue is: How bad is the end-user connection to the big network?" Sullivan says. "You can have the equivalent of a large pipe of information, but if the end user is only using a straw to access that information, it won't do any good." Chris Conger, a quality-assurance engineer for online retailer Lucy.com, agrees. "One of the biggest problems on the Internet today is the last half mile--smaller Internet service providers and end-user connectivity issues," he says.

So what can be done to combat poor user connectivity issues? Sullivan says one step a company can take to minimize network connectivity issues is to consider using a co-location site. "Most companies are really making their investments in the servers and infrastructure because that's where they can maintain the greatest amount of control," Sullivan says. "For many, outsourcing to a highly reliable co-location site like Exodus will provide better network connectivity, so at least through the backbone there won't be delays; and better performance can be offered to a larger cross-section of users."

For users that don't have connectivity problems, a certain level of performance is then guaranteed. For users still trying to access information with the above-mentioned straw, at least they will get reliable service. "At that point, if the user doesn't correct connectivity problems on their end, there isn't much else you can do about it."

A further benefit to the co-location approach is that it minimizes the network as being a contributor to performance problems. But for many, this ends up being just one piece of the puzzle.

At this juncture in the connectivity process, Sullivan has repeatedly witnessed the opening of many issues when companies turn their attention to their own applications and infrastructure in their quest to maximize performance. Because robust E-commerce applications can have an infinite combination of Web servers, application servers, databases, routers, and so on, identifying and selecting an appropriate point solution to resolve problems becomes very difficult.

"There are a lot of solutions aimed at the individual components of the E-commerce infrastructure, and it can be pretty frightening for the IT department to put it all together," Sullivan says.

John McHugh, VP of product marketing at Precise Software Solutions, a Westwood, Mass., provider of performance-management solutions, agrees. "In this industry we hear a lot of feed-

back about database problems or application problems," he says. "It isn't that there are problems, as much as that these individual components need to be tuned to work with each other and not against each other. There can be some confusion in terms of people measuring the individual components, rather than looking at the whole picture, of how an E-commerce transaction winds its way through the entire infrastructure and how the pieces of the infrastructure work together."

When performance problems arise, McHugh suggests taking a holistic view of the cause and effect to help trace the source of the problems. He says the ability to isolate a problem makes it easier to solve and minimizes the counterproductive activity of casting blame.

Return to main story, "Web-Site Monitoring Derails Problems."

Illustration by Marlena Zuber

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page

---