71% of IT Departments Want Ability to Detect Web Problems before Users Call Helpdesk, and to Rapidly Pinpoint Faulty Infrastructure Components

IT professionals complain that lack of end-to-end monitoring hampers Web operations and troubleshooting efforts, increases management costs, and impacts customer satisfaction

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 11, 2005 — Over two thirds of IT departments first learn about Web site problems when users call the helpdesk to complain. Moreover, few IT groups get proactive notification about site slowdowns from monitoring tools before users complain, according to a survey sponsored by the Web performance management experts at Symphoniq Corporation.

"Only one part of the problem has changed in the six months since Forrester analyst Jean Pierre Garbani reported that as many as 76% of performance problems are first identified when users call the help desk,¹" noted Symphoniq CEO Hon Wong. "What's changed is that IT is now aware that they have a problem. Confirming this is a survey from Gartner that found end-to-end monitoring is IT's number one investment priority in the area of performance and availability.² And this is exactly what TrueView does for Web applications."

71% of the IT professionals surveyed indicated that they want the ability to continually monitor all their users and URLs, while a mere 34% currently have the tools to do so. The same number of survey respondents also expressed that they want the ability to trace user complaints to their cause, but only 21% say their existing tools can link site problems back to specific infrastructure components.

"There is comparatively little attention devoted to monitoring the actual end user experience," said Jean Pierre Garbani, Forrester analyst and expert on performance management issues. "IT uses deep-dive monitoring tools for individual components inside the datacenter, but they lack a comprehensive overview of site pages as they are experienced by all web users. Yet, it is at the end-user level that the most important service metrics can be captured. Response time, for example, is the best global health indicator of system performance, and availability does not mean anything if not measured at the end point."

The Symphoniq Web performance survey took place in April and May of 2005. At Symphoniq's behest, leading market researcher Harte Hanks contacted over 1,000 IT professionals at enterprises with internal or customer-facing Web applications.

Symphoniq TrueView Detects Problems and Pinpoints the Source

Symphoniq's TrueView Web Management Suite monitors all users and all URLs, all the time in order to give IT organizations a complete view of application infrastructure performance. It provides the sophisticated performance analysis required to manage today's complex Web applications. Because TrueView measures specific legs of each transaction's journey from browser to backend, it tells IT exactly where to look when problems occur. By tracing slowdowns to specific IP addresses, servers, method calls, and SQL queries, TrueView eliminates costly manual troubleshooting and shortens mean-time-to-repair, saving companies millions in helpdesk and productivity costs, and thousands of hours of IT labor.

About Symphoniq Corporation

Symphoniq Corporation (www.symphoniq.com) created the patent-pending TRUE™ (The Real User Experience) monitoring technology to track real responses times from the browser to the back-end. Symphoniq's TrueView product suite simplifies the complexity of managing Web applications and services. Based on the TRUE technology, TrueView analyzes end-to-end performance, making it easy to find and fix problems and bottlenecks. Since 1990, Symphoniq's executive team has delivered innovative solutions for managing enterprise environments, first by founding EcoSystems, then NetIQ (NASDAQ:NTIQ). Leading companies from Fortune 500 to Web 2.0 use TrueView to rapidly diagnose Web disruptions, plan Web infrastructure improvements, reduce operational costs and improve customer satisfaction.

Symphoniq®, TRUE and TrueView are trademarks of Symphoniq Corporation and may be registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

¹Forrester Report. "Managing Performance from the End User Perspective". Jean-Pierre Garbani, Robert Zimmerman, Thomas Powell. November 5, 2004.

²Gartner Report. "Poll Reveals Buying Preferences for Availability and Performance Monitoring". Debra Curtis, Cameron Haight, Raymond Paquet. April 18, 2005.