Sean Moriarty, executive vice president of technology at TicketmasterOnline- CitySearch in Los Angeles, also makes a clear distinction between infrastructure and content monitoring. But determining whether what they're delivering is what the user needs is another matter. Like Medd, Moriarty uses homegrown tools designed to assess whether or not his sites are delivering the particular type of content they're supposed to. The idea, Moriarty says, is to create test content that the application has to retrieve, just as it would from a real user query. In the case of CitySearch, for example, that content might be a set of events taking place in an imaginary city that's been created purely for the purpose of executing periodic content monitoring tests.
Scripts can launch the appropriate queries and then convert the returned data into a single number.
Not all Web content can be monitored by such techniques. This is done using photos taken of the customers at local Eyeweb opticians' offices. Those photos are uploaded from the local offices to the site, where they can securely be accessed by customers. If the local office's camera isn't calibrated just right, the frames won't look right when they're superimposed on the customer's photo. But that visual problem isn't something that a testing application can easily be programmed to evaluate.