Our winner, Gomez, nudged out stalwart Keynote and Web monitoring newcomer BMC. All three offer good service monitoring and reporting. But Gomez outpaced the competition with its impressively granular performance-data gathering and service-monitoring controls. Keynote, which has the most experience in this area, charges too much. BMC has done a good job focusing on services while maintaining its strengths--network and systems monitoring. In the middle of the pack, we logged some excellent offerings from Elk Fork, AlertSite and Dana Consulting. Bringing up the rear, Alert Me First and Computer Techniques' 1stMonitor monitor only single URLs and only from a single location. But for certain price-sensitive shoppers, they might fit the bill.
Gomez Performance Network simply gave us more information than any of the other services we tested. It isn't the cheapest service, but Gomez's pricing makes sense and is predictable.
The MyYahoo-like start page offered obvious links to existing single-URL and transaction monitors, real-time tests, benchmarked comparisons of competitors and charts and graphs. So we could determine the root cause of a Web site's trouble, GPN service led us through its considerable data collection by linking every report to some contextual information. It didn't solve all our problems, but it did provide the deepest insight of all the services we tested.
Most of the services tracked how long it took to resolve DNS times, connect to the server, download the first byte of data, then download all of the content. Gomez goes a bit further by breaking out offsite redirects, root pages and each object on a page. This last service--called page object or element tracking--is offered in real time and provides historical data. It gave us a unique view into the exact makeup of each page and our transaction performance.
Gomez's trending reports provide a quick gauge for longer periods. The reports offer many and varied options for time, chart type (line or bar histogram) and data aggregation. We liked the data view, a quick summary of the single-URL and transaction monitoring, linked to underlying daily detail summaries, which were in turn linked to daily details for each monitoring location. The Gomez interface let us choose multiple transactions or single URLs to display concurrently for comparison. Gomez retains data for one year--one of the longest periods offered among the services we evaluated.
The alerts log on Gomez's product has a nice filter--by test, time, error type, subject line and progression. The usual historical time slice and sort by monitored device is similar to that offered by Dana Consulting's, Elk Fork's and Keynote's products.
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