If a site is fast yet unavailable infrequently, it's still meeting expectations. This new performance push helps explain the proliferation of monitoring services from the likes of Exodus Communications, Freshwater Software, Gomez, Keynote Systems, Mercury Interactive, Service Metrics and newcomer WebHancer. They analyze how sites are performing from the perspective of their customers. In some cases, they recommend adjustments to improve visitors' experiences. But performance is often lousy, and that affects business.
Monitoring can help companies identify problems occurring outside the corporate infrastructure.
Online stock broker Ameritrade used test data from Keynote to pinpoint and correct problems emanating from an ISP, says CIO Jim Ditmore. Such problems sometimes stem from faulty connections between ISPs. In Ameritrade's case, one ISP boasted T3 capacity at its end points, but that bandwidth was throttled back to T1 on the parts of the network the ISP doesn't own. Since going to its ISPs armed with Keynote data demonstrating the performance degradation this problem caused, Ameritrade has has been able to work with pro-viders to ensure more consistent bandwidth and more favorable peering. Another financial services provider, Deutsche Bank, has used Mercury Interactive to identify and correct performance problems.