'Net Features : monitoring

DejaClick Supports Performance Monitoring in Chrome

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:55:00 GMT

The Chrome Web browser is absolutely kicking the virtual snot out of every other browser (unless of course your brand caters to an aging, anti-Google audience).

Google's Chrome has grown by more than 25 percent globally, and among the more technically savvy is approaching 50 percent penetration. Where there is greater demand, developers have to react to ensure a consistent, optimal experience in their applications.

Website performance monitoring tool Alertsite, for example, just announced that it now supports playback of its Web recorder, DéjàClick™, for the Google Chrome Web browser. If you're interested in ensuring user's experience is of the highest quality, in-browser monitoring is the way to go - just make sure that, like Alertsite's Dejaclick, it covers the major browsers (or at least those used by your audience).

“Delivering high-quality experiences to online visitors using all major browsers is an absolute imperative today, and SmartBear makes it easy and straight-forward to understand both functional website availability and Web performance via Chrome as well as Internet Explorer and Firefox,” said Ken Godskind, VP Monitoring Services at SmartBear Software, makers of Alertsite.

“This recent upgrade with AlertSite represents what is happening with the use of browsers in the market today. Regardless of the browser used, AlertSite provides businesses with the valuable insight into the online experiences of their users."

Enterprise-class Service Opens its Doors

Michael Garrity — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Like Prometheus, enterprise-class Web and cloud systems monitoring company Monitis is bringing power usually reserved for the largest of large-scale businesses to everybody else. The company recently announced that it was going to extend all of its enterprise monitoring features into Monitor.Us, its free monitoring service.

Now, businesses of any size will be able to leverage enterprise-class features to gain insights into the performance of their Web systems. This major change will make Monitor.Us one of the most feature-rich free hosted Web and cloud-monitoring systems on the market.

This move was made in large part because of rapid cloud adoption by companies of all shapes and sizes, a switch that makes it more important for businesses to be in charge of their IT systems regardless of location.

Until recently, many of the most powerful Web application performance tools were far too complex (and expensive) for small and medium-sized businesses to even consider, but this makes 77 new features available to virtually anyone who wants them. This opens up a host of benefits for companies that want to leverage Web and cloud systems monitoring, including supporting a smooth transition to the cloud that lets companies know their applications are secure.

The new features include a cloud monitoring service for the free and independent monitoring of cloud apps and environments, a real browser end user-monitoring service that lets businesses conduct full-page monitoring of load speeds to identify individual problems and a custom monitoring service that lets users create their own “types” of monitors for their highly specific individual needs.

Keynote Rolls Out New UX Performance Metrics

Michael Garrity — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 22:00:00 GMT

Internet and mobile cloud testing and monitoring firm Keynote Systems has announced the availability of its Keynote Transaction Perspective 11 and MyKeynote 11 solutions.

Transaction Perspective, an on-demand site-monitoring service for Web performance, now provides brand new user-experience (UX) metrics that leverage the capabilities of Internet Explorer 9.

These new UX metrics include the following:

Time to First Paint: This shows the moment when on-screen rendering begins and tells a user that the site is responding to their action.

Time to Full Screen: This shows when a user’s browser or screen has completely rendered the page (even if additional rendering takes place below the fold).

Time to Interactive Page: The final metric indicates when users can start clicking or swiping or doing whatever they do with the content on the page.

Version 11 will also feature nine new Browser Event metrics based on specifications laid out by the W3C Navigation Timing standard, allowing Keynote to offer enterprise-level IT operations greater insights into the performance of all key phases in a Web page’s lifecycle by observing in more granular detail the small milestones that take place during a browser’s construction of the page.

This information will be presented via the MyKeynote monitoring portal for Web and mobile sites, redesigned to help operations teams find and use performance data charts and graphs in their day-to-day management of websites.

Measuring all of these key milestones in a Web page’s delivery is growing in importance because recent research from Microsoft claims that 250 milliseconds — the virtual blink of an eye — can make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer.

“Businesses are finding new ways to make Web pages feel faster to customers," says Keynote VP of product management and corporate development Vik Chaudhary. “That perception of performance, or user experience, is critical for businesses to monitor closely and now requires measuring much more than total page speed. They must measure user experience from start to finish.”