* Getting perspective on applications with Keynote
Well, Black Friday (the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday) has been and gone and in its wake consumers laid out some $7.2 billion toward their holiday shopping. According to consultancy comScore, for the week ending Friday, Nov. 28, online sales (excluding travel and auctions) rang up $1.2 billion, an increase of 31% over the figure from the Thanksgiving week of 2002.
ComScore also predicted that online retail spending will reach between $12.1 billion and $12.6 billion for November and December, an increase of between 25% and 30% over 2002. Interestingly another consultancy, Forrester Research, predicts a greater growth (42%) but for around the same total sales value (more purchases of smaller value).
So if you are at the pointy end of online sales – running Web applications that take orders and provide the infrastructure for making money – you need to ensure that what you expect of your Web apps, the embodiment of your business processes, is actually happening.
You need to find and solve the causes of service outages and poor performance that typically require extensive and costly instrumentation and management. A new product from Keynote Systems called Application Perspective is designed to address these issues but with what the company claims to be the lowest total cost of ownership.
Application Perspective provides a real-time display of your Web infrastructure by following and measuring the performance of synthetic transactions being run through the system.
Application Perspective works with a network of servers – the Keynote Transaction Services – on the Internet submitting the synthetic requests to your servers. This network, according to Keynote, consists of “over 1,500 strategically located measurement computers connected to the major Internet backbones in over 50 cities worldwide.”
Behind your firewall, a Keynote Application Monitoring Agent detects these requests and tracks them through packet monitoring of your internal network as they are sent from Web server to application server to database, profiling the performance of each step. That data is then moved back to the transaction services and integrated with the performance data as measured by the Transaction Services.
The data is then processed at Keynote’s data center and you can retrieve reports with a Web browser. The monitoring agent also provides a client-side Service Console. Your view of your Web applications system consists of a multi-paned display showing current performance compared to baseline measurements, drill down component data, and alert data presented on a scrolling ticker.
The Keynote Application Perspective has an “Instrumentation Option,” which integrates the Keynote system with HP OpenView Transaction Analyzer to provide a greater level of diagnostic analysis.
Keynote Application Perspective pricing starts at $4,000 per month. Now you have no excuse not to be ready for next year’s Black Friday rush.
