An impossibly slow Web site may be worse than having no site at all. As it becomes critical for sites to guarantee consistent response times, companies are turning to more sophisticated tools and services to test and monitor their Internet applications. NetCalibrate, which last year spun off from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, has been focused on supplying software that measures the quality of service on a Web site. In the early days of the Web, much site management was done using the Simple Network Management Protocol, which supplies remote monitoring through software agents on Internet devices. To fill in where that monitoring technique left off, NetCalibrate came up with iVision QOS Analyzer.
Data networks are bursty in nature.
Calif. The iVision QOS software pulls together many site performance parameters beyond just network traffic statistics. For example, it measures how much bandwidth each user needs while working on the site. It also knows how long each user is waiting for a response from the site, and where congestion points occur. On one customer's network, iVision QOS identified employee Internet usage as crowding out corporate apps on the wide area network, with a resulting drop in response times. By providing more Internet access to local offices, the customer freed up WAN bandwidth for normal operations, Leong says.