Putting a Web face on application management

Barry Bloom has a lot on his plate. As chief architect for e-business at cosmetics maker Mary Kay, he can't tolerate poor Web application performance.

"We're really focused on application performance management. In 2003, we're looking more at how the user experiences our Web site," Bloom says. With about 85% of the company's orders being processed over the Web and 200 servers supporting that infrastructure, he says in the past his staff depended upon pouring through event logs - a task that ate up too many staff hours.

"Even with the logs, all we would get was a couple of lines of text saying there was a problem. We didn't know what the user saw," he says.

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Barry Bloom has a lot on his plate. As chief architect for e-business at cosmetics maker Mary Kay, he can't tolerate poor Web application performance.

"We're really focused on application performance management. In 2003, we're looking more at how the user experiences our Web site," Bloom says. With about 85% of the company's orders being processed over the Web and 200 servers supporting that infrastructure, he says in the past his staff depended upon pouring through event logs - a task that ate up too many staff hours.

"Even with the logs, all we would get was a couple of lines of text saying there was a problem. We didn't know what the user saw," he says.

To prevent any worry lines from developing and to boost application performance, Bloom recently signed on with TeaLeaf Technology to implement its IntegriTea Web application management software. The software helps him track performance for the Web interface relied upon by more than 900,000 Mary Kay independent beauty consultants serving customers in 33 markets worldwide.

IntegriTea works to pinpoint performance errors and transaction failures on Web sites. The company says the software spots errors, such as page deliveries and database failures, not typically detected by other types of management software. Bloom bought IntegriTea because one feature in particular stood out to him.

"The software can record entire user transactions. So in the past when we only had logs, now we have the whole transaction. We can look at it, and we use it from a development perspective," he says. On top of that, Bloom says Mary Kay can now gather statistics, such as determining the overall page size after it has been generated. Information such as that will help developers determine if certain pages are too big for certain sized modems that end users may be using.

"Honestly, it's allowed us to raise the bar on the things we do to make our applications work better and make the end-user experience better," Bloom says. Since implementing IntegriTea about three months ago, he says Web application performance has seen an improvement.

"We've gone from 99.5% availability in our application to about 99.8%," Bloom says.

IntegriTea captures the composition of every Web page sent to every user, alerts IT to possible problems, quickly resolves errors and communicates problem resolution across the enterprise with visual documentation of Web application failures, the company says.

IntegriTea software is installed on a dedicated server. Other software, called capture filters, is installed on a Web server or an application server, or customers can choose to use TeaLeaf's network appliance that would be located on the network edge. Users can access IntegriTea via a browser though the company's Web-based portal.