Our tests left us without a doubt as to our winner. Gomez's service was more detailed, easier to work with and more sophisticated than the others. For example, all the services have some static thresholds, like the number of tests that have to fail before a fault is alerted and notification sent. Gomez offers this feature and gathers performance data over time to form a baseline. Percentage deviation from this baseline can be used to set thresholds for notification.
Gomez also sets what it calls Health Monitors for measuring service impact. Both the "at risk" value and "critical" value are defined by the monitoring locations. A status report will show a health value for a page or transaction and give you a quick check as to whether you're meeting your agreed-upon service delivery.
Items such as response time, content match, transaction failure alert, page object alerts, page inaccessible and server unreachable all had different values that can be set to trigger an alert. And each could be specified as a percentage of failing nodes or a fixed number of nodes. We would have liked to have notification groupings like these in the services from BMC, Dana Consulting and Elk Fork. This would have let them send different notifications to different Web sites or network administrators based on their need to know when particular transactions or URLs failed.
User-access security is a two-tiered model, with an admin group and user read-only group. More groups, finer granularity and delegated authority would improve this model. We weren't thrilled with the fact that inaccessible options were offered in the user interface. It says the administrator is allowed to change preferences only, but the interface let us enter edit mode and appeared to save the changes without any warning that they might be invalid due to access restrictions. It turned out that the changes weren't saved and security was enforced. But these unavailable UI actions should be removed.
GPN service 4.0; Last Mile URL Monitoring. Gomez, (877) 372-6732, (781) 768-2100. www.gomez.com
BMC Patrol Express is a new offering--production began just as we started testing. Ordinarily, testing any "1.0" release gives us the heebie-jeebies, but we were pleasantly surprised with this service. Patrol Express provided the best views among those services tested, and it consistently demonstrated maturity and stability. The BMC legacy of deep system and network monitoring is evident in Patrol Express.
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