Trace source of Web app problems

Hon Wong poses an interesting question to those of you responsible for Web application performance: "How do you monitor from the eyeball?" The CEO of Symphoniq Corp. in Palo Alto, Calif. means how do you know what end users are experiencing from your application if they don't (and they overwhelming do not) let you install a performance-monitoring agent? The answer, as you'd expect, is with his company's software, TrueView.

TrueView injects a few lines of HTML code in each Web page. It calls a temporary JavaScript program that monitors the performance of the application. Because the JavaScript only monitors its app and does not remain on the end user's machine after the session is over, Wong says the product is not spyware. He claims that the TrueView injection adds less than 3% of overhead to Web page response time. TrueView also has probes, or agents, that reside on all the tiers in your application, so you can trace application performance end to end. Wong adds that TrueView is also an ideal tool for testing Web apps before they go into production. One drawback, TrueView only works with Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers.

On Tuesday next week, Symphoniq will release TrueView 2.0. It adds support for AJAX, Flash and Silverlight-based Web applications. Pricing starts at about $20,000.