Candle Updates, Refines Its Web Site Monitoring Tool

Computerworld - Candle Corp. is planning a late-July release of an updated version of its Web site monitoring tool, designed to more finely track site performance and resolve some compatibility problems plaguing the earlier version.
Candle's EBA Service Monitor, released last year, places a 10KB Java applet on a user's PC to measure such things as how long it takes Web pages to appear in the user's Web browser or how long it takes transactions to be completed.
Release 1.1 of the monitor will include two new features, said Al Duey, director of business development for the EBA solutions group at El Segundo, Calif.-based Candle.
The first new feature, called Browser Instance ID, identifies each session in which a customer logs on to a Web site with a unique name. This allows site managers to do a total analysis of the paths specific users took through the site but without identifying the user, said Duey.
The feature is attractive to one customer of the current monitor. "It really points out the flaws in the navigation paths" users must take through a site, said William Harvey, services director at AT&T Solutions in Florham Park, N.J., the network management and outsourcing unit of AT&T Corp.
Insight into End Users
AT&T Solutions uses the monitor, among other products, to measure and improve the performance of the Web services it provides to private customers and application service providers through its AT&T Web Performance Management Service.
"Their technology is unique in the marketplace," said Harvey. "What differentiates the EBA product is the real ability to get beyond the Internet cloud and get insight into the actual end user and the end user experience."
The second feature is a new way to tag the Web pages whose performance will be tracked on users' PCs. Currently, the monitor tags every Web page as it is transmitted from the Web server, but it misses some Web pages due to idiosyncrasies in how different Web sites create the pages, said Duey.
Static Tagging
"Due to the combinations of . . . Web servers used and the techniques the builders of Web sites used to automatically build dynamic HTML, sometimes we weren't able to dynamically tag a page," he said.
The new version will include "selective instrumentation," which will allow a customer to specify which pages they want monitored. It will also allow customers to tag static HTML or the templates used to build HTML pages, as well as dynamic HTML, which is customized for each user.
Pricing for Release 1.1 willstart at $2,000 for a starter pack that allows users to track up to 10 Web addresses. A version that allows the tracking of an unlimited number of Web addresses will cost $10,000 per server it's installed on, said a Candle official.
Candle will also sell its Web monitoring capabilities as a service, called CandleNet eBusiness Assurance, with pricing ranging from $2,000 per month and up depending on the volume of data tracked.
As part of the eBusiness Assurance program, Candle will collect and host data about a customer's site performance and provide access to the data.