With the increasing popularity of Web 2.0 features, developers and testing professionals need sharper ways to track the user experience.
Keynote Systems has introduced new versions of Transaction Perspective 8.0 and Application Perspective 5.0, the company’s Web performance monitoring products designed to handle the various features Web 2.0 produces.
The new version of Transaction Perspective includes the Keynote Internet
Testing Environment (KITE), which allows developers and site monitors test and measure users’ experience with AJAX-based sites.
“It’s designed to test and monitor Web 2.0 sites, mashups as well as more
traditional Web sites and hone in on different aspects of performance,”
Abelardo Gonzalez, Keynote product manager, told InternetNews.com.
The service will measure site performance in a mashup
to help determine the cause of a site slowdown.
Gonzalez said KITE also records and analyzes pattern recognition within pages. This feature is becoming increasingly important as more sites use AJAX and other tools to bring functionality and new content within the page as opposed to having users click to new ones.
“We’ve always had a recorder, but with KITE we’ve extended a lot more
functionality,” said Gonzalez. “As part of tackling AJAX in this release we
had to go really deep into the network layer from an engineering view, so the
network interceptor looks at everything going in and out.”
Alongside Transaction Perspective is the update of Keynote’s Application Perspective 5.0, a software-as-a-service
Application Perspective includes the KITE recorder, as well as support for multiple browsers using an embedded JavaScript engine. Application Perspective 5.0 also includes HTML and header capture designed for users to make a visual diagnosis in the event of an error.
Gartner research vice president Milind Govekar said the onset of SOA and
Web 2.0 technologies has increased the unplanned downtime of applications
from 40 percent to 60 percent. He said monitoring these applications is
“absolutely an imperative.”
“However this is not just a production or IT operations problem; it has
to be dealt with across the entire life-cycle, i.e. development and testing,” he wrote in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.
While not commenting specifically on Keynote’s announcement, he
said most of the solutions on the market today are fragmented among various
software and service provides. “Solutions that are able to deal with all the
stages of the lifecycle provide better outcomes,” he said.
