Candle Corp will today unveil an internet performance monitoring package claimed to be the first to measure the web experience from the end-user’s perspective. The Santa Monica, California company argues that conventional internet performance monitors offer a server-side view of their web sites’ activity, and so offer no insight as to whether visitors, often customers, find the experience efficient or effective.
Candle claims its new eBA*ServiceMonitor overcomes this shortcoming by reaching out to take measurements from the client as well as the server. Whenever a visitor requests a web page from an eBA-equipped server, a 100-byte counter file is tagged onto the end of the page. As the page starts to load, the user’s browser launches a Java applet that begins to conduct measurements, storing results on the counter file, which is then returned to the company. Candle says no cookies are left on the client.
In this way, eBA can record a variety of activities, including the length of time a user spends on any one page, how visitors navigate around sites, or which browser they use. The product is thus a fairly comprehensive profile of real visitor activity at an eBA-equipped web site which users can either analyze using their own data warehousing and evaluation tools, or which can be uploaded to Candle’s site for evaluation using Candle’s own Cognos-based reporting service.
The price for ServiceMonitor is $2000 for a 10-URL starter pack. Enterprise level configurations start at $100,000.
