Keynote Systems Inc. is looking to drive Web site performance testing into smaller companies in July with a new performance monitoring service priced as low as $50 per month.
The RAPT (Red Alert Performance Tracker) service provides active performance and availability monitoring for client sites that require frequent polling, high transaction volumes and low cost.
RAPT can measure Web page performance as frequently as every 5 minutes from multiple locations and provide quick alerts with diagnostic information when problems occur. In addition, customers can create scripts to provision testing from a self-service portal that requires no intervention from Keynote personnel, officials said.
One company that conducts most of its sales activity via the Web has found RAPT indispensable. The Web “is the way people find us,” said Brian Pollock, CEO of Open Biosystems Inc., in Huntsville, Ala. “With the cost savings and the breadth [of testing], it did quite a bit more than I expected for the expense.”
The $50-per-month fee excludes a one-time $19 setup fee and covers a single page with testing from four cities at 15-minute intervals. The cost goes up $10 per page for each additional city, with a maximum of 16 cities globally. Monitoring a five-page transaction from 10 cities every 15 minutes would cost $510 per month, which greatly undercuts competitive services from rivals such as Mercury Interactive Corp., said Keynote officials, in San Mateo, Calif.
Keynote will address high-end users in mid-July with a major new release of its flagship Transaction Perspective performance testing service. Version 5.0, which provides full-blown testing of composite transactions, adds the ability to test Web services transactions for Simple Object Access Protocol applications. It can test Web Services Description Language calls, get XML validation and authentication, and track errors, according to Keynote officials.
As part of the new release, Keynote also revamped the user interface for its script recorder to simplify interaction with five of the companys key services. It also adds the ability for scripts to mimic authenticated clients.
Transaction Perspective 5.0, due by July 15, costs $1,295 per month for five Web pages from 10 cities.