Keynote consolidates IT's view of online business performance

As Web sites become more complex, it gets harder to make sure all the elements are performing well for end users.

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Web sites today are larger and more complicated than in the past. They incorporate rich content such as Adobe Flash and Silverlight, are tied into third-party content providers, and execute more asynchronous application communications and complex back-end server integrations, says Vik Chaudhary, vice president of product management and corporate development at Keynote Systems, which specializes in Internet testing and measurement.

Combine all those technical advances with an audience that’s more mobile, and more geographically distributed than ever before, and it gets really hard to monitor the performance and usability of an online business.

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As Web sites become more complex, it gets harder to make sure all the elements are performing well for end users.

Slideshow: Products of the week

Web sites today are larger and more complicated than in the past. They incorporate rich content such as Adobe Flash and Silverlight, are tied into third-party content providers, and execute more asynchronous application communications and complex back-end server integrations, says Vik Chaudhary, vice president of product management and corporate development at Keynote Systems, which specializes in Internet testing and measurement.

Combine all those technical advances with an audience that’s more mobile, and more geographically distributed than ever before, and it gets really hard to monitor the performance and usability of an online business.

“Keynote has seen first-hand the fast pace of change and increasing complexity of the Web,”
Chaudhary said in a statement. “These technical developments represent fundamental shifts occurring on the Internet. Our customers require Web performance monitoring and measurement solutions that keep pace with the speed of the Web.”

To help fill in the blanks, Keynote last week unveiled a new version of its performance-monitoring portal, MyKeynote 9.0. The most significant new feature in the upgraded release is the ability to view the performance of Web transactions, mobile transactions and streaming video – all in a single portal.

From the unified portal, IT departments can manage the measuring, monitoring and testing of Web sites and applications, mobile sites and device-resident applications, and streaming video. These metrics are presented from the end-user perspective, so IT can see what kind of performance its customers are experiencing.

In addition, the same measurement provisioning, graphing, reporting and alarming capabilities now work across the full range of Keynote products, so IT can tap a single set of tools for all their Web and mobile properties, including those containing streaming video.

On the streaming video front, MyKeynote is now tied into the vendor’s Streaming Perspective monitoring product, which measures the quality and reliability of streaming media.

"Streaming video and audio is growing exponentially and increasingly ingrained with Web sites,” Chaudhary said. “This was the ideal time to integrate all the powerful functionality, reporting and alerting features of Streaming Perspective directly within the powerful MyKeynote portal that our customers use to view and administer their Web and mobile site monitoring measurements running with Keynote.”

For companies that are tracking dozens of Keynote measurements, the vendor added tools that make it easier to specify groups of people who should receive specific trend reports or alerts, depending on their roles in the company.

New sorting and filtering capabilities in MyKeynote 9.0 include user-defined measurement labels that let IT staff organize their site performance measurements by themes, such as by Web property or transaction type.