Making business sense of Web-traffic data

Coradiant on Thursday announced it would couple its Web-traffic-analysis product with business-intelligence capabilities to help IT managers better understand the impact on the business of the user experience with Web-based applications.

Coradiant, which packages Web-traffic performance-analysis software in its TrueSight appliances, today added a device to its product portfolio, the Web.I WI-2100 Performance Analytics appliance. The new box plugs into the network and works with Web traffic and transaction data collected by TrueSight appliances. Web.I then adds business-intelligence analytics to show IT managers how well Web applications perform based on several criteria, such as user, geographical location or branch office, the company says.

"Web.I can build data cubes of every end user, showing how that user experiences a Web application from a different city or office, where network and other conditions are variable," says Alistair Croll, Coradiant co-founder and vice president of products. Coradiant's products promise to capture the real -- meaning data and performance metrics based on actual, not synthetic traffic -- user experience with Web-based applications. "This product lets IT talk in terms of the business. When you start with end-user experience as opposed to network latency, IT and the business can speak the same language."

For instance, Web.I applies business-intelligence analytics to volumes of user traffic (TrueSight appliances capture thousands of Web transactions per second, the company says) in real time, and provides reports about performance issues to IT and line-of-business managers. In addition, the appliance learns from user-experience monitoring how changes to network configurations could impact performance for the client. The data collected by TrueSight can be warehoused and tapped by Web.I for ad hoc queries to spot user-experience trends over time.

Croll says although the product was designed with performance analytics in mind, beta customers have been using it to establish service-level management objectives, perform change impact-analysis and, in some cases, fraud detection.

"The tools can give IT managers insight into user activity on applications," Croll says. That can show if an application is being tapped by more users than it is licensed for, or by unauthorized users. IT managers and business managers can create role-based dashboards to view the data and analytics in relation to their responsibilities.

Coradiant competes with Compuware, HP's Mercury Interactive, Indicative Software, ProactiveNet and TeaLeaf, among others.

Available now, Web.I comes in two models. The enterprise model, for companies with one data center, works with one to three TrueSight appliances; it starts around $75,000. The global deployment model, designed for multiple data centers, works with as many as eight TrueSight applications; it costs about $110,000.