Patrol Express starts with a status screen organized around groups of service. Each service, which can consist of single URLs and transactions, shows an overview of color-coded bars for the underlying Web page, and the number of monitoring locations having trouble executing the URL or transaction. These services are then applied across the product for performance and fault views.
The services are organized like a directory. After you select a branch representing a service or transaction, the right-hand window displays the aggregation of the service at whatever level you select. There is no dumbed-down explanation for the CEO and no clicking through meaningless happy-face graphics for those who know where they want to go.
We first looked at alerts for our entire account; then we drilled down by service, which consisted of URL and transactions related by the site they were running against, then by the separate URLs and transactions within the service. It's more useful to see high-level views when they're organized into logical groups this way.
Patrol Express has current-status and health-status options, which display historical performance in relation to service goals or thresholds as primary service-monitoring screens. Its reporting isn't as granular as that offered by Gomez, but the service shows performance over time, in comparison to thresholds, for availability, MTTR (Mean Time To Repair), page download and transaction path time. We created groups that included similar services and Web pages. We could then run all of the above reports on the entire group, or a particular transaction, on a page-by-page basis extending back as far as 12 months.
A log of alerts gave us a precise history of what happened. As alerts are resolved, they are displayed with an "X" icon. Of course, if an intermediate
problem continues to occur, there's an obvious trail in the log.
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