Ajax and rich Internet applications (RIAs) present a challenge to system administrators looking at application performance.
Traditional performance monitoring tools focus on the network and the servers, but what about the performance the end user is experiencing working with a Web portal? That is a problem Myke Borylo, senior Web infrastructure engineer on the enterprise integration team at American Century Investment Services Inc. was looking as performance became an issue at portals used by investors.
"The biggest problem we have with most of our Web-based systems," he said, "is that we get the dreaded 'system is slow.' That's one of the worst. And we don't know where or who or how many users are being affected."
