Pivia adds end-user perspective

Pivia Software last month brought another point of view to its software line: the customer perspective. Pivia Performance Measurement Tool tracks application performance from end-user browsers.

PPMT works with Pivia Performance Server (PPS) 4.0 and measures network behavior and browser times, which Pivia says are critical to accurately representing the user experience. PPMT captures and plays back sequences of user events through an Internet Explorer browser running on the desktop.  For each user event, PPMT captures and reports on network download time, browser download time, data size and packet count.

According to Pivia, other performance measurement tools simulate browser behavior, but that often misses caching optimizations, which reduce the number of browser requests. Also, many performance measurement tools do not quantify the benefits of packet size reduction, which can affect user performance over slower connections.

PPS software is installed on a Linux server, in front of Web servers and in back of load balancers in a data center. If there is no load balancer, the box sits in front of a router and firewall. PPS 4.0 watches application packets, looking for redundant or repeated patterns to cache.

Pivia introduced PPS 4.0 in April:

https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/accel/2004/0426netop1.html

Available now, PPS 4.0 pricing starts at $50,000. PPMT is designed to compare and report performance information with and without PPS. PPMT is a companion product included with PPS 4.0.