Web Performance Watch

Another Win for Keynote Customers

When Keynote introduced Cloud Application Perspective last year, we believed that it addressed a critical gap in the way companies monitored the performance of their Web applications. As “cloud” technologies have emerged, websites have become more a coupling of components from multiple assembly lines, rather than a product manufactured in a dedicated IT application factory. Monitoring the performance of a website in its end-user state—the sum of the many parts—makes sense. But when issues arise, quickly finding their location in the “supply chain” can be a challenge.

What if you could drop something into that “supply chain”, at the key points of potential failure, giving you insight into your Web app’s performance? What if this was so easy to install, a non-IT person could do it in minutes? And what if the cost was just pennies per measurement?

Last week, the SIIA CODiE awards recognized Keynote Cloud Application Perspective for best Cloud Application/Service, along with Google and Scribe Software. They did so because Cloud Application Perspective offers customers a radically new way to monitor their websites and applications. Unlike traditional APM options, Cloud Application Perspective is uber-portable, monkey-simple to implement and really affordable.

Although we’re honored to have won this award, our customers are the real winners. Taking advantage of the cloud can be complex. Monitoring it should be easy. If you’d like to see how easy it can be with Cloud Application Perspective, get a free trial today!

Speed and Tenacity: the Apple iPad Outage

We’ve heard a lot recently about the importance of speed and performance when it comes to online retail. The New York Times highlighted research from Microsoft claiming that 250 milliseconds—a mere eye blink—could make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer. And a popular infographic touts that Amazon would stand to lose $1.6 billion in sales per year from a 1 second web page delay. Our friends at Walmart.com have also shared some awesome research linking web performance to conversion.

These statistics are welcome news for the web performance community. But sometimes they don’t apply. With Apple, a lot of rules don’t apply.

 

This past weekend, Apple sold a record 3 million new iPad 3 tablets. That’s pretty phenomenal. Yet, it came on the back of a pretty bad outage only 10 days before.

On March 7, Apple announced the new iPad 3. For effectively the entire day, the Apple Store was unavailable. That meant no one could check out the new iPad, nor purchase iPhones, MacBooks or anything else.  

To Apple’s credit, the Apple store normally runs very quickly—averaging well less than 2 seconds for total User Experience Time and less a second for Time to First Paint. (The Apple Store is a member of the Keynote Retail Performance Index, measured with Keynote Transaction Perspective.)

We’ve written previously about the concept of tenacity. A website visitor’s tolerance for errors, or delays, is a major factor when balancing the cost and benefit of building capacity and engineering performance into Web applications. While Apple’s fanatic customer base is an extreme, it illustrates the point that there’s a continuum of performance expectations for users.

Your product/service is unique. And your customers are also unique. Keynote web load testing consultants dig into web analytics to model user behavior. They consider familiarity, tenacity, interaction speed and connection speed when developing virtual user profiles. It may be unrealistic for you to understand how different levels of performance impact your various customer types across all these variables. But if you can begin to understand them, you’ll be in a better position for setting ongoing performance goals and SLAs—especially around tolerances for outliers from your averages.

Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience

Last month, we announced that the Keynote Global Network was being updated with Internet Explorer 9. As a result, our real browser monitoring service, Transaction Perspective™, is now measuring the performance of Web applications and sites using Microsoft’s latest Web browser. This makes Keynote the first on-demand monitoring service built on IE 9, which is pretty cool. But what’s even cooler is the ability that IE 9 gives us to measure a new class of performance metrics we call user experience metrics.

As we’ve discussed here previously, IE is still the big kid on the block when it comes to browser usage. With the demise of IE 6 in the United States, and the rise of Firefox and Chrome, it’s clear that users are quickly leaving “old” browsers for “modern” ones like IE 9. With high performance and broad support for open Web standards, browsers like IE 9 make it easier for companies to create a rich and snappy experience for consumers. In response, 34% of the top Internet sites now use HTML 5, and the use of JavaScript continues to rise. Transaction Perspective built on IE 9 allows customers to get a more precise view of their sites’ performance, especially those leveraging new Web standards.

Our new Live Beta preview of MyKeynote 11 with Transaction Perspective lets you see performance in very important ways:

• Time to First Paint – This new metric tells you when a user begins to see your site render in the browser.
• Time to Interactive Page – Tells you when the Document Object Model (DOM) begins to process user events for the document.
• Total User Experience Time – With User Experience Time, you know how long a page (or series of pages) took to render and become usable for a real user.  It is the ultimate measure of a page’s speed, factoring not only the time it took for data to be downloaded, but also rendered and made interactive.

These key moments are just a handful of the browser events we capture. If you’re a performance expert, you’ll appreciate that we measure all the Browser Navigation Timing events and can graph them individually over time (multiple measurements), as well as display them in a timeline view for an individual measurement.

KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) lets you to test for free your site’s performance from 5 cities on the Keynote Global Network, on demand. But if you’d like to test drive User Experience monitoring, click the “24x7 Monitoring” button in KITE.

Once you’ve activated your trial, click the “Try Beta Version” link in MyKeynote. There, you’ll be able view User Experience metrics for everything monitored during your trial.

Soon, you’ll be able to see these new browser event metrics from your desktop in KITE, as well. Your copy of KITE should automatically update itself to version 5, or you can manually check for the new version. 

Let us know what you think of these new features!

Cyber-Awesome: Killer Performance Helps Drive Record Revenue

For years, Keynote has been monitoring the ‘net’s best websites and reporting on notable outages during the peak Black Friday and Cyber Monday online shopping period. Typically, we find that many online retail sites—both pure Internet and those with brick and mortar stores—experience some issues. But the trend has been towards better performance and higher availability. This year marks yet more progress toward the goal of a trouble-free and virtually instant shopping experience. And the numbers suggest the payoff for retailers has been huge: a record setting $1.25 billion in online sales for Cyber Monday, 2011.

The Keynote Top Retailers Index tracks 47 online shopping destinations. This year, the average website response time was 3.05 seconds. According to a study by IBM, online sales peaked at about mid-day, and spiked again later in the evening. Average response times across the Top Retailer Index reflected this pattern as peaking demand slowed sites. But the absolute impact even at its worst was only about 1 second of delay. That’s great performance across the industry as a whole.

Additionally, the availability of these websites remained extremely high throughout the period. Out of the 47 sites tracked, only 10 (21%) experienced any downtime at all and their average availability was around 99.0%.

So how did online retailers get to this pinnacle? We see that customers are maturing the technology, processes and culture of their Web Operations around a passion for performance and deep preparation. One example of this is Keynote customer Karmaloop.com who rang up their biggest day in company history and over 100% more sales than the same period last year. Though careful planning and web load testing, they were able prepare their site for the demands of such a dramatic increase in traffic and order transactions.

The improving trend in website performance throughout the increasingly demanding Black Friday and Cyber Monday period is encouraging. But it also means that if your site experiences failure or less than stellar performance, your competitor is in a much better position to attract and retain your abandoning customers. Congratulations to the online retail industry for hitting a remarkable milestone over the past six days. Keep pushing performance higher through December!

Taking Advantage of the Cloud

As we’ve mentioned here before, adopting cloud computing strategies can generate transformative advantages for IT organizations, but not without important considerations. Reducing cost and improving user experience can be achieved by moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud. So how do CIOs get started, and more importantly, enforce and improve the quality of service they deliver to the business in a cloud paradigm? Vik Chaudhary recently spoke with the editors at CIO Insight on how companies can take advantage of the cloud with three straightforward recommendations.

 

Filtering Out Web Performance Monitoring Traffic From Google Analytics

If you're a webmaster, site owner, or e-commerce business manager, picture this scenario. You open your Google Analytics dashboard and you see a big spike in traffic. At first, you're really excited - wow, look at all those site visitors! You run off to tell your boss that she can give you that bonus she promised if you got that online marketing campaign to work. And then... you learn that someone in the Site Ops team added web performance monitors, and so it's all so-called robots - synthetic traffic generated for the purpose of keeping tabs on your site's response time and availability. 



You think, no problem, I could filter that out from Google Analytics, and then you learn you can't. It's always going to be there, like, forever. You go crazy, emailing the GA team, posting on forums, and then slowly resign yourself to forever dealing with that spike. It will disappear from your default view, maybe after a month, but that's a long month to wait. And heaven forbid if your execs ask you for a site traffic report for the past year, try explaining why you can't filter out that spike - what, you weren't thinking ahead? What kind of guy did we hire to run our online business, anyway?

Don't let this happen to your career. Plan ahead and learn how to use Google Analytics to filter out all web performance monitors from your site analytics reports. Here's the recipe:

STEP 1: Find Out the User Agent String for your Web Performance Monitors

Keynote's monitors, like all other web performance monitors, insert a special marker in the browser, called an user agent string. An Advanced Segment in Google Analytics allows you to filter out all traffic that contains this marker. So all you have to know are the user agent strings that Keynote adds to the browser. Keynote has several performance monitors - using real IE and Firefox browsers, or mobile browsers. Each performance monitor comes with its own special marker, so you have to construct a regular expression to filter all of these out.

Here are the browser markers that you have to use to filter out web performance monitors:

Keynote - Use "KHTE" (for Application Perspective monitors), "KTXN" (for the real browser Transaction Perspective monitors). Other companies whose user agent strings I know of are: "AlertSite" (AlertSite), "GomezAgent" (Gomez), "Pingdom.com_bot_version_1.4_(http://www.pingdom.com/)" (Pingdom), "YottaMonitor" (Yottaa). 

If you are using a web performance monitor not listed above, Google "<insert your monitoring vendor> user agent string" and you will definitely find the user agent string you need to know.

Next, we will create an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics to filter out this synthetic traffic.

STEP 2: Create An Advanced Segment to Filter Out the Web Performance Monitors

Make sure you are using the new Google Analytics version, by clicking on the "New Version" link at the top of your GA page. You should now see the word "beta" right below "Google Analytics". Ensuring that you are in the MySite tab, click on Advanced Segments.

In the bottom right area of the Advanced Segments dialog box, click on this button:    and name it "Real People". We will now create a segment that filters out the synthetic traffic from web performance monitors. Here's the Advanced Segments dialog box:

Now, here's the tricky part - writing the regular expression that the Advanced Segment requires. Here is the regexp that filters out both the Keynote and Gomez monitors. Be careful to use the string exactly as shown, with the periods and asterisks: .*(KHTE|KTXN|GomezAgent).*

It's critical that you use a regular expression correctly, and getting it wrong is why I suspect many people believe that Google Analytics can't filter out this traffic. Once an advanced segment is created, then all traffic AFTER today will be filtered in the reports, but this will not apply to traffic that was generated prior to your creating this advanced segment. That's what I believe, from trial and error, though Google Analytics help says that you can filter out historical traffic. In any case, it's important you setup these monitors anyway, because you have no control over someone else setting up web performance monitors - even if your company didn't create performance monitors, your competitors could be monitoring your site's performance and creating all this traffic to your site - it is the world wide web, after all.

STEP 3: Select the Real People Advanced Segment When Viewing Data

Drop down the Advanced Segments dialog box, and select "All Visits" on the left hand side, and the advanced segment that you created, "Real People" on the right hand side.

Click on Apply, and view your data:

Now, it would be nice if I could choose "Real People" as the default segment to apply to all my reports, but I can't do that in Google Analytics yet. Nevertheless, you now have a handy way to view all the traffic and exclude web performance monitors, including Keynote.

After the Storm: Of Aftershocks and Hurricanes

What a week for the people of the Eastern Seaboard. Earthquake, then hurricane within a matter of days. Both events dominated the local and national news cycles, and struck in the very same geography. It appears that resulting damage was relatively low despite the historic magnitude of the quake, and the sheer scale of hurricane Irene. Interestingly, the impact of both events on the Internet and usage of the Web was dramatically different.

As we reported last week in our Mobility blog, the 5.8 magnitude Virginia earthquake demonstrated what studies have suggested in regards to the way people use the Web for accessing breaking news and information: they reach for their smartphones. Within hours of the quake, the Washington Post experienced outages and a huge spike in response time due to overwhelming demand across the major wireless carriers in the region, as well as its fixed-web property.
 
By contrast, the Washington Post, and other major news and weather websites did not experience the same degradation in performance when Hurricane Irene hit. This graph shows the availability of a prominent news network's mobile site throughout the week.


We thought maybe the major weather sites would also show signs of stress as the hurricane approached. Here you can see the response time of one weather site throughout the event that shows a steady ramp over the week to its peak on Saturday, but no dramatic spike. (Post-event power outages in the region are reported to have since diminished Internet access.)

So why didn’t people grab their smartphones to continuously check on the advance of the hurricane? Many probably did. But the quake was a complete surprise, catching people outside of their homes in their schools, offices and shops. Warnings of Irene’s disaster potential were well reported. So although Irene has wrought an estimated $3-billion in damage—10 times more than the losses estimated from the Virginia earthquake—its impact on news and weather sites was minor in comparison.

Of Aftershocks and Hurricanes

What a week for the people of the Eastern Seaboard—earthquake, then hurricane within a matter of days. Both events dominated the local and national news cycles, and struck in the very same geography. It appears that resulting damage was relatively low despite the historic magnitude of the quake, and the sheer scale of hurricane Irene. Interestingly, the impact of both events on the Internet and usage of the Web was dramatically different.

As we reported last week in our Mobility blog, the 5.8 magnitude Virginia earthquake demonstrated what studies have suggested in regards to the way people use the Web for accessing breaking news and information: they reach for their smartphones. Within hours of the quake, the Washington Post experienced outages and a huge spike in response time due to overwhelming demand across the major wireless carriers in the region, as well as its fixed-web property.

By contrast, the Washington Post, and other major news and weather websites did not experience the same degradation in performance when Hurricane Irene hit.

We thought maybe the major weather sites would also show signs of stress as the hurricane approached. Here you can see the response time of one weather site throughout the event that shows a steady ramp over the week to its peak on Saturday, but no dramatic spike. (Post-event power outages in the region have since diminished Internet access.)

New MyKeynote Version: Hot Fun In The Summertime!

Keynote's crack Engineering and Operations teams released version 10.4 of the MyKeynote portal on Wednesday night.  We've made some great improvements in the user-friendliness of our graphs, bringing all the controls you need to tweak your visualization directly to the forefront.

 
We've also added the option to include only error datapoints in scatter plot graphs, clustered 3D bar graphs, page-level trending in long-term graphs, and much, much more!

Deep Link to Keynote Website Performance Data

By Ian Withrow

MyKeynote is designed so you can easily move from high level trends and events down to detailed data points. Users start with an alert or a scatter plot and then iterate down into successive levels of detail, typically culminating in a waterfall chart and details for a specific measurement that we took for them. However, sometimes a customer already knows what specific data point they wish to drill down onto.  For example, if an APM or RUM solution that you have captures a Keynote transaction you would naturally want to compare the user perspective of that transaction side by side with the system perspective provided by your other tools.  In this way you could see both endpoints.  Deep linking to detailed Keynote data points could also be handy in highly automated operations enviroments.  Imagine if your trouble tickets included direct links to poorly performing data points associated with an alarm?

As you may have guessed by now, in this post I’m going to show how you can link directly to a data point or waterfall in Keynote. I expect this will prove handy for operations tools, devops, and performance analyst types who want to compare the Keynote data with APM data or possibly want to iteratively retrieve waterfall visualizations of data that meets specific criteria. In fact Keynote partners with a number of APM vendors like OpTier, ExtraHop and OPNET so you may soon see the ability to link from one of these APM solutions to Keynote visualizations.

Before we proceed I must mention that you will need our Data Feed or DataPulse service.  DataPulse provides a near real stream of Keynote data. Data Feed provides the same data but every 15 minutes.

Keep in mind that I'm appropiating functionality here that wasn't designed for this purpose. Yes it's a creative hack, but don't let that stop you from enjoying the benefits.

 

How To Deep Link Into Keynote

MyKeynote offers two types of visualizations that you can link to directly if you know when the data point was collected, which agent took it, and which transaction or script it is associated with. Happily all of this information can be retrieved from the aforementioned data services. In the below example I use excerpts from Data Feed XML files. DataPulse has all the same information; the XML file is just formatted slightly differently. Either way Keynote has user guides for both of these services if you want more details on them. From this point I’m going to assume some familiarity with these XML files.

 

Step 1 – Gather the Variables Needed for the MyKeynote Request

In XML Data Feed, each record starts with the following tag. The variables we care about are colored green.

<TXN_MEASUREMENT agent="45537" slot="845480" datetime="2011-JUL-05 22:37:51" target="1034270" agent_inst="45538" profile="0">

Additionally if we have a multiple page transaction we’ll need to know what page we care about. Each page record in Data Feed has the following tag which specifies page information.

<TXN_PAGE page_seq="1">

The hardest part is that we need to convert ‘datetime’ to a base UTD number. In English, this is the number of seconds that had passed since 01-01-1997 12AM (GMT) when the data point was captured. This may sound hard to figure out but writing a program to do this conversion is fairly straightforward. Here is how to quickly do the conversion by hand.

1. Go to: http://www.epochconverter.com/ a handy site that lets you quickly convert data and time formats between human readable version and Unix Time
2. Copy ‘datetime’ from your XML file, in our case the value is 2011-JUL-05 22:37:51
3. Enter this value into the “Human date to timestamp” converter and run it as shown below
4. Subtract 852076800 from the result; this converts the number from Unix Epoch time to base UTD.
5. In this case we get the value 457853871, save this result for later since we will need it in the next step.

 

Step 2 – Build the MyKeynote Request

First, a caveat these requests are only fulfilled if the user is already logged into MyKeynote. If not they’ll be asked to login and will need to try again. As mentioned previously we have two options.

1. Display a page waterfall
2. Display a transaction summary which compares multiple pages in a single transaction.

If what these two options represent isn’t immediately clear to you that’s ok. Below I describe how to form a request for each along with a screenshot that shows what you’ll get for your efforts.

 

Waterfalls

A waterfall can be requested using the below URL with the variables you need to fill in denoted in {brackets}.

http://my.keynote.com/newmykeynote/transpagesingledrilldown.aspx?transid={target}&agentid={agent}&butd={UTD}&ksid=5&profid={profile}&pageid={page_seq}&mskin=0

As you may recall in the previous step I described how to find each of these inputs.  Remember if you have only one page in the transaction then the value there is of course 1.  Below is a completed example and the resulting output.

http://my.keynote.com/newmykeynote/transpagesingledrilldown.aspx?transid=1034270&agentid=45537&butd=457853871&ksid=5&profid=0&pageid=1&mskin=0

Transaction Drill Down

For many transactions each data point will be comprised of multiple pages. If you want a detailed view comparing each page, instead of a waterfall for one page, the following request will do the trick.  Again variables are specified in {brackets}.

http://my.keynote.com/newmykeynote/scatterplotdrilldown.do?transid={target}&agentid={agent}&butd={UTD}&profid={profile}&pseq=-1

Note that in this case we don’t care about page number, if you did specify a pseq value it would actually take you to the waterfall for that page.  A completed example below:

http://my.keynote.com/newmykeynote/scatterplotdrilldown.do?transid=1034270&agentid=45537&butd=457853871&profid=0&pseq=-1

Building a Bridge from a Log

Now some of you may be saying wait a minute, what if I only have the log or the header from the Keynote requests to start with?  How am I going to get from that to the Data Feed or DataPulse record?  Fortunately we add a header to each Keynote agent request formatted as below.  In the header is the target and UTD value which should be sufficient for you to find the right XML record.  Example:

X-KTRACE

457853871|45538|1034270|0|1\r\n

Or rewritten using our variable names:

UTD|45538|Target|0|1\r\n

Wouldn’t it be nice if the agent number was in there too?  Sorry I warned you this functionality was developed for another purpose and that we are being opportunistic here.

 

Conclusion

I recognize this won’t be for everyone. For those operational groups that are trying to shave off every bit of time they can from their MTR numbers then being able to jump directly to detailed Keynote data points from say a Nagios or an APM system will save you valuable time. Do let your account team know if you like this an want an expanded solution.

Contrarian View: Amazon Outage Proves the Promise of Cloud Computing

By Ian Withrow

Those who know me well can tell you that I’m hardly a frothy fan boy, indeed I’m a died in the wool skeptic. So it may come as a surprise to you to hear that I view the fallout of the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage as a very positive sign for Cloud Computing. Sure some sites got taken down, including one of my personal favorites Quora. However, another favorite site of mine managed to survive the incident with comparatively minor hiccups: Netflix. This is the bright spot I want to highlight. I just happened to have a performance measurement for Netflix in my Keynote account. On the east coast starting at 12am April 21^st, Netflix’s performance for successful transactions stayed a consistent couple of seconds and was available 96% of the time. Granted this isn’t flawless execution, note that the 27 failed data points are all timeouts resulting in just a red screen. However, compared to what happened to many sites, this is outstanding. (Y-axis details obscured)

It’s not dumb luck that got Netflix off this easy. It’s the product of hard work and engineering time invested in building their Amazon Web Services deployment the right way. As Netflix has been touting in various cloud conferences this year, they’ve been forced to fully embrace AWS due to their tremendous growth. Basically they only run credit card transactions in their private network. To ensure they always have enough capacity (and incidentally are highly available) they have turned provisioning decisions over to their operational systems.  Whenever an Amazon instance is poorly performing they terminate it and get a new one.  Likewise if there is an availability zone acting up (like what happened) then they automatically switch over to another.

This is how real high availability has always been done in networking: ensure that you can automatically failover to logically, physically, and geographically separate resources.  Any real engineer will tell you that problems and failures will happen.  Your availability track record is not based on how frequently this occurs but how gracefully you recover from them.

Herein is the promise of Cloud Computing: namely the favoreable relationship between cost and failover capabilities. In a private network world you would have to build and pay for a lot of stuff yourself: multiple data centers, double the hardware, internet access connections on opposite sides of the building, etc.  Very quickly the cost of high availability gets prohibitive, locking out all but the deepest of pockets.  Netflix explicitly said at Cloud Connect they came to the conclusion that they, even with all their growth, just weren’t big enough to justify building their own network of redundant data centers.

Enter Cloud Computing.  Now having access to redundant data centers is just a matter of purchasing the right performance monitoring tools and the engineering time in programming your applications and operational systems to take full advantage of on demand resources.  In the end you only pay for what you use of the infrastructure, not what you might need as is the case when doing it yourself. That’s what the real shame and promise highlighted by this outage is, young companies like Quora and Foursquare could easily have done just what Netflix has done.  The barrier to entry here isn’t a huge budget but the knowledge and priorities to do the work. The next step of course after fully leveraging Amazon is to be able to failover to different cloud providers, I’d bet you $100 Netflix is working on exactly this right now.

In a way this drives home a point we’ve known all along.  Cloud Computing is not outsourcing, this implies a transfer of risk and responsibility. You, not Amazon or Microsoft or Google etc., are responsible for the performance of your applications whether they are in the cloud or not.  Cloud Computing is a powerful tool to increase performance and availability many fold while reducing costs, if it’s used correctly. If you don’t use the tool properly then an outage isn’t Amazon’s fault, it’s yours.  I'll leave you with this thought, Amazon seems to agree: according to Gartner Analyst Lidya Leong this isn’t an outage that generates service credits. (Quote at very end of article)