Turning Incredible Promise Into Credible Reality

New technology adoption is always a push-pull dance. Enterprises want the productivity and competitive advantage, but are understandably cautious until the risks are understood and performance proven. New technology vendors want to get out ahead of their competitors and gain preemptive market share quickly, sometimes before all the kinks are worked out. For both sides, it boils down to credibility.

Some SaaS vendors are proactively putting their performance stake in the ground and backing it up with guarantees. RightNow, a CRM application provider, starts giving money back to clients if up-time drops below 99.9 percent. Intacct, which offers financial management and accounting applications, offers a similar guarantee, and publishes their uptime stats right on their Web site.

“Web performance monitoring helps you to protect your bottom line, but also to build your brand and build customer loyalty,” says Neeraja Rasmussen, Keynote senior marketing manager for Web Performance, about SaaS vendors. “You can guarantee that you can deliver a certain level of service. Verified third-party data with high levels of trust is a definite competitive advantage for SaaS providers.”

Such data is the heart of effective, enforceable SLAs. And in a nascent SaaS marketplace, solid SLAs are imperative for credibility.


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1. Cloud Testing – SaaS 
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Web Performance Monitoring Just Got More Better

Recently, Keynote released an exciting new product Keynote Real User Perspective. This newest member in the Perspective family of monitoring services delivers actionable insight into the performance of Web and mobile sites based on the experience of real users.

Real User Perspective is special in 3 ways:

1. Lightweight SaaS
2. Start-to-end Real User Journeys
3. Integrated with Synthetic

Keynote now offers the most comprehensive offering for end user experience monitoring delivered as a service. It culminates a tremendous amount of development, infrastructure orchestration, and feedback from the scores of customers who participated in our product advisory and beta programs. Customers can now complement active, clean-room, synthetic monitoring with passive, real user monitoring that aligns to business outcomes—a marriage made in heaven! We think that’s more intelligent web performance monitoring.

You can request for a free trial now!

Website Monitoring 101 - Part1

Welcome to the first part of ‘Website Monitoring 101’ series.

In this post series, we are going to examine all the ins and outs of website monitoring and more importantly, how you can maximize the effectiveness and ultimately the profitability of your website monitoring. Let’s begin by looking at what is website monitoring, how you use it and some of the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.

What Is Website Monitoring?

Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a Website or Web application from different locations through the day. Website monitoring is used to ensure that sites are live and responding to viewers, to generate trends that show performance over time, and highlight a range of factors that could affect the functionality of a Website. Website monitoring services also help you benchmark your Website against the performance of your competitors to help you determine how well your site is performing.

Keeping your Website performing consistently and available at all times is essential to the success of your online business. Website monitoring helps you ensure that your Website is functioning optimally and is accessible to Internet users every second. From checking Website average load time on a regular basis to alerting you of problems from locations around the world, a good vendor guarantees that your Website functions flawlessly.

Conclusion: In this first ‘What is Website Monitoring’, you have been introduced to why ‘Website Monitoring’ is so effective.

In next posts, we will expand on the information introduced in this first part by looking at some more advanced ‘website monitoring’ strategies, tactics and ideas.

Related Links

Free Website Monitoring

Website Monitoring Software

Web Page Monitoring from end user's perspective

Don't let your site go dark this holiday season.

Keynote is helping retailers to get ready for the holiday shopping season with a free offer for website monitoring and mobile testing. Retailers, in particular, have no time to waste to prepare for this coming holiday shopping season. Mobile is expected to be responsible for retail site visits during this year's holiday season.

Keynote Web Performance Monitoring allows you to:

• Obtain accurate, real-time data about your site’s overall performance, speed and availability
• Measure rich Internet applications and track the performance of third party content on your site
• Know how your shoppers in New York City, San Francisco and any other city around the world may be experiencing you site

Be sure your site can handle the traffic on Black Friday, Cyber Monday or any other day of the week – 24 / 7/ 365.

Get your 7 days of free website monitoring – today.*


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10 Tips to Improve User Experience of your site

Hi. My name is Ben, and I plan to visit your website a lot! I’m a casual user that likes to browse the Internet, and like everyone else I know, I hate to wait. Although your website is really cool, and I love your products and services, the Internet is full of interesting places and I’m easily distracted. Oh, and did I mention that I love using my Android smartphone and iPad to play, connect, shop, bank and book travel when I’m not at work? All I want for the holidays is a speedy web and mobile site.
Here are top 10 wishes of a user for you and your site in 2012:

1. Please test your code/site on IE and not just Firefox before you launch it. I am one of the 50% that will continue using IE, even after they start auto-upgrades!
2. Understand the difference between browser execution and network/back-end performance. Most pages have both and you need to know which is which to optimize the page/site. One way is to monitor using a real browser.
3. Understand how your page renders. Focus on reducing upfront (pre-render) delay. It’s the one me and your other users feel the most!
4. Please make sure your third party tags (analytics and others) are below your visual content. (Did I mention rendering delays and blocks are aggravating?)
5. Please combine your external JS and CSS files. I’ve been saying this for years, but very few sites seem to follow this recommendation. Do it, and I’ll see a major improvement in the speed of your site.
6. Understand the quality your Content Delivery Network is providing. Every website is unique, and not all CDN providers are created equal.
7. Don’t worry so much about overall page size but instead focus on individual file/resource sizes. Keep them under 100K and you will limit the impact of slower connections. (Did I mention I love my smartphone?)
8. Don’t just push your desktop website to mobile. You will fail.
9. Test your mobile web site… please!
10. Read Keynote’s Page Construction Guidelines. They’re chocked full of goodies to help you optimize the performance your Web pages and keep visitors like me happily clicking through them, instead of away to your competitor’s site.

What’s on your wish list for better web and mobile performance in 2012? Let us know in comments!


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"Performance" to cloud providers typically means only availability

One reason cloud performance monitoring is so critical is that cloud provider service is so nebulous. "Performance" to cloud providers typically means only availability; and even availability is only loosely guaranteed. For Amazon Web Services, as an example, unavailability means no connectivity at all during a five-minute period; if your user has a lousy, erratic, miserably slow connection, as far as Amazon is concerned, they've delivered. And availability means availability when it leaves Amazon's door; whether or not anything actually reaches your user is not Amazon's problem (regardless of their choices for ISP and connectivity). Oh, and the burden of proof is on you, the customer. For all intents and purposes, Amazon is not even checking to see if you even have service.

This is not to dump solely on Amazon. The same guarantees, or lack thereof, are typical of many cloud providers. In addition to the caveats above, scheduled and emergency downtime is excluded from availability guarantees; penalties for unavailability are minimal, and certainly not commensurate with potential business damages; and any other kind of performance is not included in the service level agreement.

An ideal cloud-client working relationship includes substantial SLAs, external monitoring of SLA parameters that is visible to both provider and client, and meaningful recourse if the service falls short. In lieu of this ideal, however, the onus is on the enterprise to put cloud monitoring and measurement in place and to hold their provider accountable – so they can either get the service level they need, or switch to a better provider.

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