Patent ID: 7149799

Claim:
A monitoring tool comprising: a placebo transaction dispatcher for dispatching placebo transactions to at least one subscribing e-commerce system; a response collector for collecting responses to dispatched placebo transactions; a logger for computing transaction latency data based upon when a placebo transaction is dispatched to said at least one subscribing e-commerce system, and when a response is received in said collector; a multi-dimensional status array indexed by a URL and sample size of each at least one subscribing e-commerce system, said multi-dimensional status array comprising an indicator indicating that a placebo transaction has been submitted to a corresponding subscribing e-commerce system, an indicator indicating whether a response has been received from the corresponding subscribing e-commerce system, transaction latency data associated with the corresponding subscribing e-commerce system, and an average response time for the corresponding subscribing e-commerce system; and, an alerter for alerting said subscribing e-commerce system when computed transaction latency data indicates an unreliable response condition in an associated back-end transaction processing system.