E-firms get end-user view of Web site performance - Keynote Systems Inc - Company Business and Marketing

CommunicationsWeek International, Nov 15, 1999 by Sheridan Nye

Keynote Systems is providing data to businesses trading on the Internet to enable them to monitor how well, or badly, their Web sites are performing.

Businesses are relying more than ever on electronic shopfronts to generate sales, but in this virtual trading space how can they be sure that everything is working as it should? And who should they blame when something goes wrong?

Keynote Systems Inc., of San Mateo, California, offers e-businesses a customer-eye-view of their Web sites and has built up by far the largest-scale network for taking direct measurements of Internet performance. Via some 220 measurement "agents" stationed at key Internet intersections in the United States and abroad, Keynote takes 12 million samples a day, measuring page download times, packet loss and, crucially, how quickly end users' secure sockets layer (SSL) transactions are processed. Customers can receive the results in the form of a daily e-mail summary and as longer-term performance indices that rate their Web site's performance against other retailers in their field.

"There are a whole set of problems you can only see from a customer point-of-view," said Fritz Mueller, director of product marketing at Keynote Systems.

Keynote's Business 40 Index rates 40 major business Web sites according to the time the agents take to access the home page. In the week of 18-22 October, Yahoo! came top at 1.56 seconds, Compaq second at 2.30 and Infoseek third with 2.58 seconds--a reflection of the portal sites' pared-to-the-bone design as much as their infrastructure support. According to Zona Research Inc., of Redwood City, California, most end users will abandon a Web site when response times approach eight seconds.

Webmasters can combine the response figures with detailed trace routes. These hop-by-hop analyses track page request sequences from one router to the next and can provide hard evidence of failures and clues to where faults may be originating, said Mueller.

In the event of an Internet failure, a company may have no idea that a key part of its customer base has temporarily lost access to its site, or that delays may have become so long that its server is dropping transactions. The company's Internet service provider (ISP) and backbone provider may not be aware of a problem either; or, more likely, they are too busy trying to fix it or too distracted by other priorities to notify the retailer.

With detailed data to refer to, businesses can take a proactive role, pinning down the source of a roble, and suggesting possible causes to their suppliers, said David Chamberlain, vice president, technology, at Getsmart.com of Burlingame, California. Getsmart's personal loan Web site receives up to 50,000 visits a day, and Chamberlain uses Keynote's $295 per month "U.S. 10" monitoring service to compare performance across all three of its servers and to monitor the URLs of three competitors from locations in 10 U.S. cities.

Despite modest traffic levels compared with higher-volume Keynote customers such as Charles Schwab and eBay, Chamberlain said performance data is no less crucial for smaller businesses. Shortly after signing up with Keynote in February, Getsmart's figures showed a dramatic short-term increase in latency from six to 20 seconds--an event that otherwise would have passed unnoticed by the company, if not by its customers. Trace-route in hand, Chamberlain was able to persuade the ISP to address the switch configuration problem that turned out to be the cause.

On another occasion, Getsmart's Domain Name Server (DNS) lookup process was taking far too long, and Chamberlain was again able to point the finger at the ISP, this time for having updated its DNS records from an out-of-date tape. Not that Keynote's own measuring agents are infallible. "If we see a jump in the figures we drill down to see if a Keynote agent has gone west," said Chamberlain.

However, having the evidence will not necessarily force an ISP to change its priorities for any except the largest customers. And if inadequate peering arrangements are partly to blame, the local ISP may not have enough power to negotiate change with the backbone provider further up the chain.

"It got their attention, but they weren't happy about it," said Chamberlain of his negotiations.

But often the culprit behind performance problems is found much closer to home. Slow response times with a consistent geographical pattern across the United States suggest an in-house problem such as inadequate server capacity or over-ambitious Web site design. As retail sites compete harder for consumers' attention, the temptation to compromise performance increases--for instance, by using too many objects on a page or too many colors in an individual graphic, said Peter Sevcik, senior analyst at Northeast Consulting Resources Inc. (NCRI), of Boston, Massachusetts.

In a study comparing his own formulae with historical Keynote data from October 1998 to January 1999, Sevcik found that overall Internet performance had improved since an earlier study in 1995. The average response time fell to six seconds from 12 seconds, despite an 80% increase in the average size of business Web pages to 90 kilobytes from 50 kilobytes, and a 120% increase in complexity based on the number of "turns" or queries initiated by the browser in order to complete a download of a single page.