PRESS RELEASE
Keynote Announces Updated Red Alert Service for Faster
Online Problem Identification and Notification
New Version Offers Five-Minute Monitoring; Integration
with Enterprise Perspective
Note to press: Call Keynote's media hotline at (650)
403-3254 to request further information on Keynote
Systems, Inc. or an interview. To be added to Keynote's
press-release distribution list, send an email to
press@keynote.com and specify your press affiliation.
SAN MATEO, California, July 9, 2001 -- Keynote Systems
(Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority®, today
announced an update to Red Alert™, its up/down real
time Internet monitoring service, that now tests devices connected
to the Internet every five minutes. Red Alert customers can
now choose five-minute monitoring to test the availability
of any Internet server or other TCP enabled Internet device
including Web servers, secure Web servers, Domain name servers,
mail servers, FTP servers and Network Gateways. All Red Alert
events are also integrated in Keynote's new Enterprise Perspective™
service allowing valuable real time up/down alarms to be easily
assigned and managed through the customer's existing enterprise
management console (see related Keynote press release issued
today).
Research indicates that many accessibility failures cannot
be detected locally since the problem is often located in
another device or some other piece of the infrastructure between
the server and the end user, not the server itself. Keynote's
Red Alert ‘outside in' service constantly monitors the
availability of its customers' mission-critical networks,
Web servers and applications from an end-user perspective,
sending immediate alarms identifying both error type and IP
address within the notification allowing the enterprise to
deploy the right resources quickly and intelligently in order
to minimize downtime.
"As a hosting and managed services data center, we have
many commerce sites that demand little or no downtime in order
to avoid loss of income," said Gerald Hagan, CEO of Fortix,
LLC. Red Alert has always been a great tool for providing
notification of problems. The new five minute monitoring feature
allows us to be much more proactive in maintaining our service
level agreements with these critical customers."
"There is increasing pressure on IT professionals not
only to minimize down time, but also to prove the return on
investment for infrastructure expenditures," said Matt
Parks, director of product management for Keynote. "The
only way to do that is to have access to fast and accurate
data about the performance and availability of systems which
allows for immediate triage by the right person. Keynote Red
Alert five-minute monitoring and the ability to integrate
Red Alert alarms into the enterprise management console along
with external performance data create a unified solution for
managing business critical applications and devices."
Recently, a study by researchers at the University of California,
San Diego, estimated that nearly 4000 Denial of service (DoS)
attacks per week are launched against commercial Web sites,
Internet infrastructure equipment, government agencies and
home PCs, and that 2 to 3 percent of all DoS attacks studied
targeted domain name servers. Because Red Alert monitors name
servers and Network gateways, IT departments have the capability
of monitoring for DoS attacks against a domain name server
from outside their network, allowing for identification and
triage before DNS caches begin to expire.
"It can be difficult to detect a DoS attack from inside
your firewall", said Lloyd Taylor, vice president of
technology and operations for Keynote Systems. "In many
cases, DoS attacks can fill your pipe to the Internet without
saturating your Web servers. If you are sharing bandwidth
with other companies (such as in a hosting facility) an attack
on another website can take yours down, without any noticeable
problems on your website. Unless you are testing from the
greater Internet, you may well not even know that you are
under attack!"
By providing Keynote customers with Red Alert five-minute
accessibility monitoring and sophisticated real-time alerts
as well as its other benchmarking, diagnostic and load testing
services for the enterprise, Keynote continues to strengthen
and expand the range of solutions the company provides which
are critical for superior online customer service and customer
retention. Keynote provides the enterprise with unprecedented
access to a family of outsourced solutions for measuring,
assuring and improving the performance of their Web sites
from an end user perspective.
About Red Alert
Keynote Red Alert offers a near-zero false alarm rate which
is of great importance to Web masters, system administrators
and operations personnel tasked with maintaining 100% uptime
of their network operations centers, Web servers, email servers
and other Internet devices. The Keynote Red Alert checking
sequence is designed to provide foolproof verification of
a monitored device's accessibility to the Internet. Every
error condition is triple-checked, using three fully independent
Internet connections with no common points of failure including
backbone, local Internet access providers or local network
equipment among them. Keynote Red Alert customers are notified
about a problem only after Keynote Red Alert has attempted
three different paths to their device and found the connection
to be inaccessible or malfunctioning all three times.
When Keynote Red Alert detects that a monitored device is
inaccessible, is returning incorrect data or is responding
slowly to connection requests, the service immediately dispatches
error notifications to customers' designated personnel by
email, numeric or alpha-numeric pagers or wireless phones
via text messaging. Red Alert monitors any IP based infrastructure
device or server designated by the customer independently,
so it quickly detects the root cause of a problem. Accessibility
problems then can be addressed before the end user experiences
performance problems.
Red Alert five-minute monitoring is priced at $59.95 per
device/per month with the availability of other enhanced services
such as Autotrace and gateway monitoring priced starting at
$9.95 per device/per month.
About Keynote
Keynote Systems (Nasdaq "KEYN"), The
Internet Performance Authority®, is the worldwide
leader in Internet performance services that enable
corporate enterprises to monitor, benchmark, test,
diagnose and improve the quality of service of
their e-business applications and systems both
inside and outside the firewall. Keynote's Perspective™
family of services benchmarks and assures the
performance of Web page downloads, transactions
and audio and video streams. KeyReadiness™
is an outsourced Web site load testing service
designed from the ground up to reflect the unpredictable
and dynamic nature of Web traffic. The service
brings unprecedented new degrees of accuracy and
realism to the load testing market. More than
2,900 corporate IT departments, Web hosting companies
and Internet service and content delivery providers
around the world have implemented the company's
easy-to-use and cost-effective services to benchmark
and manage the performance of their Web sites.
Keynote Systems, Inc. was founded in 1995 and
is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The
company can be reached at www.keynote.com
or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
© 2001 Keynote Systems. The Internet Performance Authority,
Red Alert, and Perspective are either a trademarks or registered
trademarks of Keynote in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein
may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Editorial Contacts:
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote, (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com
Della Lowe, Keynote Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3233,
dlowe@keynote.com
Free
30-day Trial • Customer
Login • Pricing
• About
Us • Home |
