Getting a handle on Web site performance

Understanding just what end users are experiencing when they visit a Web site is a challenge made even tougher when a site serves up interactive content, data from third parties, and complex multi-step transactions.

To help enterprises tune their Web site performance, Internet test and measurement specialist Keynote Systems this week announced that the latest upgrades to its monitoring service are now live.

New to Keynote Transaction Perspective 9.0 is the ability to monitor interactive Flash and Silverlight applications through what Keynote is calling “screen sensing technology.” For instance, the technology can track features such as hover-over effects, action buttons, drop-down menus and text entry, to see how these features are performing for end users, Keynote says.

Users also can script, test and monitor composite Web transactions that combine multiple components such as Ajax and JavaScript. Composite transactions that pull content from multiple sources into a single transaction – such as booking a hotel reservation or purchasing an item – are difficult to test from an end-user perspective. New capabilities in Transaction Perspective 9.0 can allow Web operations groups to disassemble Web transactions to understand the performance impact of Web 2.0 technologies, Keynote says.

A new “virtual pages” feature is aimed at pinpointing third-party content that’s causing poor performance, such as ads, images or video. IT staff can group and isolate Web components by different criteria, so they can hold outside content owners accountable if performance is sub-par.

"The Next Web is being built with rich Internet applications that increasingly use large interactive Flash and Silverlight components as prominent parts of Web sites. But until now they have remained very much a black box in terms of end user performance -- we've changed that with the delivery of this version," said Vik Chaudhary, vice president of product management and corporate development at Keynote, in a statement.

Keynote Transaction Perspective 9.0 is generally available to all Keynote customers. Site monitoring for a single page transaction from 10 U.S. cities starts at $250 per month.

Keynote this week also announced an upgraded version of its free tool for diagnosing and troubleshooting Web performance issues from the desktop and the Internet cloud. Version 3.0 of KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) includes more comprehensive diagnostics capabilities and a snapshot pane that captures what was displayed in a user’s browser as a script ran, so IT can remedy problems faster.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.