The cost of failure is high. If your website is unavailable for a protracted period, your company can lose thousands of pounds as armchair shoppers go elsewhere. The same applies to sites that are slow, as most customers won't wait more than eight seconds for a page to load before heading off in disgust to find a faster site.

With so much at stake, it's important to find a way to ensure performance targets are hit. Sniffer Pulse from Sniffer Technologies gives website administrators the tools, graphs and reports to make those targets easier to achieve.

Bottleneck buster

Sniffer Pulse is a pre-configured network appliance for website and web traffic analysis. It looks at site traffic and response times, and permits system administrators to identify bottlenecks as they happen.

The device uses the Sniffer engine, so traffic has to be diverted to it either 'in-line' on a connection or through a spanning port on a switch.

To install the box using a span port, two cables need to be connected to the Ethernet ports at the back. One cable connects to the network, the other to a span port on a network switch. The in-line configuration involves a full duplex splitter card and a custom network cable to tap into a segment that carries web traffic.

After configuring and booting up the device, you enter your network settings in the console configuration application. Thereafter, Sniffer Pulse is managed via a password-protected web browser interface from any computer on the network. It supports Internet Explorer 5.0/5.5 in NT/2000 and Netscape 6.01 on Solaris and Unix. Our test device was also happy to work with a Windows XP machine running IE6.

The first connection made to the device starts the second stage of configuration: selecting which websites to monitor. This done, the device starts collecting data.

How the data is presented is down to the administrator. Separate web pages can be set up for users or groups of users so they can see measurements on the web components of specific interest to them. Custom views are easy to set up and can include how long it takes specific pages to be delivered to visitors, and the effect of specific page components on page transfers.

The defaults offered a good start in analysing problems with our test web servers. The views are collated on a 'dashboard' web page that shows the overall performance of the site. Along the top of the dashboard page are links to further pages, such as reports, alarms, settings, help and a search facility.

One particularly decent feature is the last mile analysis, which displays end-user connection speeds to the website. In multiple web server locations, Sniffer Pulse can report on the response times of individual servers as well as the number of hits for each one.

This helps give a good overview of the whole user experience, from browser to web server. Among other things, it could help in finding out if abandoned shopping carts are due to delays in credit card verification or other problems. It's even possible to analyse individual web servers, looking beyond the website as a whole to pinpoint individual servers and find out which is the fastest or slowest.

Early warning system

Problem prevention is better than problem solving. If an individual web server underperforms a defined threshold, Sniffer Pulse emails an alert to the network administrator. Email alerts can be customised and extended to anything Sniffer Pulse can measure.

The browser displays a log of network alarms generated by Sniffer Distributed Agents. It would be better if it incorporated SNMP agents and alarms as well, as these are standard features in a lot of enterprise networks.

Sniffer Pulse can present data reports on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis, and automatically generate service level baselines by the hour or day, allowing administrators to see typical traffic levels at specific times of the day or week. As the database management is automated, this cuts down on time-consuming maintenance tasks.

The cost, however, is prohibitive, especially when you consider that Sniffer Pulse is essentially a general-purpose server running RedHat Linux with some clever monitoring software on top. For this price, the company could have thrown in a monitor, keyboard and mouse. We would also look forward to future support for other browsers, such as Opera.

Sniffer Pulse is the only device that can monitor all aspects of web performance passively. Setup is easy and, given the different ways the device can be configured, should prove flexible enough for most network managers. The tables and reports are easy to deal with and provide good information about what steps you can take to optimise traffic into and out of your website, and whether your site itself could do with a clean-up.

Price
Repository, two licences and appliance: £21,049

Contact
Sniffer: 01753 505858 www.sniffer.com