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 TEST CENTER Global perspective By Tom Maddox March 15, 2002 See correction below
As a subscription service, Perspective does not come without its own costs. Prices range from $395 per URL per month for the most basic service, which monitors a given site from 30 U.S. locations in 10 cities, to a pulse-quickening $1,895 for over 90 global locations. There are four standard subscription plans, plus a variety of international and regional monitoring plans. Although Perspective is an excellent service, we recommend it mainly for companies that rely heavily on their Web presence to generate revenue; the service's cost will probably be excessive for anyone else. Perspective's tabbed interface provides easy access to performance measurements, alarm settings, diagnostic tools, and administrative functions. Administrators will spend most of their time in the Measure section, which allows you to generate detailed performance graphs. It also offers the Quickview graph, which provides a basic weekly performance measurement, and the Accu-Stat feature, which provides mean-performance numbers for a given time period divided into 15-minute increments. The graphing functionality is extremely powerful, providing comparative performance measurements among your URL, an aggregate of 40 ebusiness sites, and the White House Web site. You can also view URL performance by function: dial-up, Web site, streaming media, and transactions. Eight different graph types are provided, four of which show performance and availability by time and location. The others provide more granular information, including the performance of different page components (graphics, animations, and text), access errors (problems making the initial connection to a page), and content errors (problems downloading specific page elements). Generally, each graph can be defined according to time, geography, backbone, and specific criteria such as agent name and error type. Especially handy is the capability of specifying whether to evaluate content errors, allowing you to test connectivity and network performance isolated from page execution. For instance, you might hypothesize that your page is loading slowly because of Internet congestion, only to have Perspective reveal that a faulty script is the source of the delay. The ability to see which component is breaking and at precisely what point is key, and Perspective makes that possible by providing detailed error information. Mousing over a segment of a graph pops up a brief summary of the related data, and depending on the graph type, clicking on the section drills down to more detailed data. The volume of data provided in a given chart is massive, so it's helpful that each page can be "torn off" and viewed in a different window, posted to a URL that can be viewed externally, or saved for later access via Perspective. The data for a given graph can also be downloaded, allowing exportation to a spreadsheet or database. Perspective also has the capability of generating e-mail alarms, which are based on warning and critical alert thresholds for latency in seconds and percentage of availability. Both criteria are measured over a rolling time period between 15 minutes and four hours. Curiously, the "warning" threshold is considered a higher priority than "critical," which seems to contradict common usage of those terms and initially confused us during testing. The warning states are polled every 5 minutes; although this level of granularity is generally sufficient, the ability to configure alarm notification for different periods would be welcome. Perspective's diagnostic tools include three standard network testing utilities -- ping, nslookup, and traceroute -- as well as an Instant Measurement tool that can either display page access time or show a full graph of page access information with breakdowns of each step. All these tools can be run from any Perspective agent around the world. The Internet Health Report provides a rolling hourly or daily chart of access times between major Internet backbone providers, which can help quickly isolate Internet outage issues. And the Agent Status screen lists Perspective agent status throughout a given time period, ranging between an hour and 6 weeks. Keynote's Web Site Perspective Business Edition 6 provides a wealth of knowledge about Web site performance and accessibility. With its rich monitoring capabilities, Perspective provides any Web site administrator with a valuable tool for analyzing and improving site uptime and performance. Although the amount of information provided can be overwhelming, Perspective generally makes it comprehensible. Given its high price, however, businesses will have to decide how vital their Web sites are and whether they need the premium monitoring level Perspective provides. Correction In this article, we misreported the alarm thresholds in Keynote Web Site Perspective Business Edition 6. The critical threshold is considered a higher priority than the warning alarm threshold. Tom Maddox (tmaddox@dnai.com) is a San Mateo, Calif.-based system administrator with MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) certification and more than six years of experience.
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