Detecting Web-Site Problems Before Customers DoDetecting Web-Site Problems Before Customers Do

TeaLeaf Technology Inc. on Wednesday debuted Web-application management software that helps online marketers detect Web-site problems that scare away potential customers. Busy Web sites can lose as much as $275,000 every hour if only 20% of customer transactions fail, according to Forrester Research.

There are plenty of tools available for monitoring the performance of Web servers and other Web-site infrastructure systems. But those tools are not good at spotting incorrect data on a Web site, such as the wrong price for an airline ticket or incorrect page-to-page links--the kinds of problems that IT workers might not see but cause users to drop off before completing a transaction. Even Web-site managers might not see the problem quickly because multiple, disparate log file systems are frequently involved.

TeaLeaf's IntegriTea software is designed to tackle the problem by combining elements of clickstream analysis and Web-site performance tools. "The key is that this is a bridge between those two areas, and in real-time," Meta Group analyst Corey Ferengul says. IntegriTea assembles data about Web pages, including clickstream data that details user experiences and information from application servers. The data is compared to set policies such as the predicted abandonment rate for Web-site visitors and alerts managers to problems.

The software is available immediately and is already being used by Colgate-Palmolive, Invitrogen, and Leica Geosystems, according to TeaLeaf. Pricing for IntegriTea starts at $4,100 per month for a base configuration and scales based on the number of CPUs and users. Portal and Reports modules will be available in the second quarter.