SAN MATEO, Calif., — August 3, 2004 — Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), the worldwide leader in Web performance measurement and management services announced today that StockCharts.com, which provides immediate, real-time stock charts with statistical analysis to over 13,000 enterprise and consumer customers through a variety of subscription-based services, has chosen Keynote Application Perspective® Outside Edition and Private Edition to assure a high level of customer service and Web site accessibility.
StockCharts.com was founded in 1999 to help online investors obtain and use financial information more effectively. The site serves up an average of 2000 charts per minute - at peak times over 10,000 charts every minute.
“For the first time, online investors can actually see the dynamic interplay between markets, sectors and stocks. Anyone who visits StockCharts.com regularly cannot help but become a better informed investor,” said Chip Anderson, CEO of StockCharts.com. “Given the criticality of the data we deliver to our customers, optimum infrastructure performance and real-time chart delivery is mission critical to the success of our business. We used Keynote Web Site Perspective® successfully for some time but needed a way to monitor our performance for multi-page transactions and business processes at a deeper level and perform instant root cause analysis. Application Perspective Private Edition was the answer.”
The Business Challenge
The underlying
infrastructure of StockCharts.com consists of over 40 servers, many
linked to back-end market data feed vendors. The impact of downtime
is very significant, as one may expect, given the business model and
the critical nature of the data it delivers.
Anderson continued, “Obviously, in this competitive space, delivering data in a timely manner is mission critical to our business. And if we have a problem that affects customers, it can cost us real money. For example, a while back we experienced one day of downtime caused by an outage from one of our data vendors. We had to make good on that by giving our customers one month of free service. With our customer base, that translated into $150,000 of lost revenue! If that happened with any regularity, we would be out of business. We must address that type of situation proactively and need scripts that give us a much more specific answer than a user could - and we need to get that answer really fast. That is where Keynote comes in.”
“We must make sure that charts are delivered by our data center at the speed our customers expect, without having to spend millions of dollars in excessive hardware,” continued Anderson. “We compared Keynote Application Perspective platform relative to other services and software and found that Application Perspective provided us with all the performance monitoring and root cause analysis functionality we needed without excessive resource requirements.”
The Solution
StockCharts.com uses Keynote in
two main ways – incident management and problem management. It
measures the site main page and key transactions from Keynote's
global network using Application Perspective Outside Edition. This
provides an early warning of an overall site problem that might
affect a majority of the users. Once StockCharts.com personnel
understand what is affecting performance, the next step is to
resolve the incident in minutes, and restore the service
instantaneously, while logging the problem for root cause analysis
at a later stage.
“Application Perspective allows us to extract actionable intelligence from a plethora of raw performance metrics and data,” said Anderson. “On-going solution maintenance and total cost of ownership is very low given the hassle-free service delivery model – no hardware, software upgrades, patches etc. that we need to deal with. We obtain performance intelligence instantly, act upon it using our best practices in place, and keep the user experience at consistently high levels.”
For each transaction StockCharts.com wishes to monitor, it proactively creates a few troubleshooting transactions that are executed from a high-frequency private agent at its premises, to exercise the various transactional nodes extensively. Each agent is capable of generating up to 3000 pages per hour. Provisioning new measurements takes only 4-6 minutes.
“As you can imagine, in this environment, applications change very frequently,” said Anderson. “Application Perspective Private Edition allows us to generate thousands of pages per hour letting us monitor all our applications from a single agent, and to provision new measurements for advanced troubleshooting transactions very quickly. This facilitates real-time triage and diagnosis.”
“Using Application Perspective Private Edition we can take a fuzzy piece of customer feedback and quantify it to get down to the root of the problem,” said Anderson. “We’ve always been impressed with Keynote’s globally distributed infrastructure and coverage on many different backbones since our customers are distributed all over the world as well. Keynote’s measurement infrastructure allows StockCharts.com to emulate the precise end user experience from where the user is. When I get a number back from Keynote in New York, for example, which indicates that things look good, I can be confident in the accuracy of that data and that New York users will have a good experience.”
The Bottom Line
StockCharts gets a very cost
effective solution for comprehensive performance monitoring without
requiring several resources to administer and manage the toolset.
StockCharts.com helps its customers manage their top-line by getting
real-time financial charts at consistent quality speeds, while
managing its bottom-line by deploying a cost-effective comprehensive
performance management solution.
About Keynote’s Application Perspective
Platform
The Keynote Application Perspective platform is
the industry’s most comprehensive, end-to-end monitoring and root
cause diagnostics solution for e-business applications at the lowest
total cost of ownership. The platform consists of three modules that
can be purchased and used independent of one another: Application
Perspective Outside Edition, Application Private Edition (a high
throughput transaction monitoring agent that can be placed anywhere
a customer desires inside or outside the firewall), and Application
Perspective for HP Openview, a version tightly integrated with HP’s
OpenView Transaction Analyzer product, that facilitates deep
diagnostics behind the firewall when application performance
problems occur.
Availability and Pricing
Keynote Application
Perspective is available now with pricing starting at USD $4,000 per
month. For customers using the Application Perspective service, the
HP OpenView Transaction Analyzer integration is offered as the
“Instrumentation Option” on a subscription basis for USD $1,000 per
month. Customers work directly with HP to implement the
“Instrumentation Option” as part of their overall HP OpenView
Transaction Analyzer environment.
About Keynote
Founded in 1995, Keynote
Systems (Nasdaq “KEYN”), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the
worldwide leader in Web performance measurement and management
services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote’s services
enable corporate enterprises to monitor, benchmark, test, diagnose
and optimize their e-business systems both inside and outside the
firewall. Over 2,100 corporate IT departments and 19,000 individual
subscribers rely on the company's easy-to-use and cost-effective
services to increase revenues and reduce downtime costs, without
requiring additional complex and costly software
implementations.
Keynote is The Internet Performance Authority due to the company’s global infrastructure of over 1,600 measurement computers in more than 50 cities worldwide that capture and store on a daily basis over 40 million Internet performance measurements, frequent media citations quoting Keynote's Web performance data and analysis and the company’s growing range of market-leading Web performance indices for vertical markets http://www.keynote.com/solutions/solutions_pi_index.html.
Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at http://www.keynote.com/ or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2004 Keynote Systems, Inc.
Public Relations Contacts:
Della Lowe, Keynote
Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3233, mailto:dlowe@keynote.com
Dan
Berkowitz, Keynote Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com