KITE: Keynote Internet Testing Environment Launch at Velocity

Better late than never. At Velocity Conference I took a lot of notes and didn't get to publish them earlier. Now that I find some time on my hand, I am going to go ahead and publish them.

At Velocity, there will be two product launches. Vik Chaudhary (Keynote Systems, Inc.) and Abelardo Gonzalez (Keynote Systems) are on stage now.

The first product is KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment). Keynote has been in business for 12 years. Providing a single performance testing environment for everyone (web developers, QA and system administrators) has always been a challenge for both startups and major players. This presentation sounds very promising.

• Keynote collects 200 million internet measurements everyday.
• With KITE, You can test from desktop to the internet cloud.
• Keynote built it to provide a single performance testing environment for web developers, QA and IT operations team.
• Sites are making upgrades every single day. Customers want to be able to test it from multiple locations
  

KITE is Ideal for 3 things

1. recording , scripting and playback of web transactions
2. instant web tests from desktop
3. scheduled testing for higher productivity
   

KITE Web Performance Engine allows for:

• performance analysis for multi-page transactions, not just single pages
• Javascript programmability for scripting and DOM analysis
• testing from the desktop, Last Mile and the Internet Cloud
• Native IE integration which in turn allows for easily analysis of AJAX, Flash and Javascript
• Recording of test scripts which can be played back in "burst" mode and share scripts
  

Next is a demo by Abelardo Gonzalez.

• You get a script repository that you can save for performance benchmarks.
• There is a record button and a free global test button.
• They will be testing iGoogle.
• You start a session then as you take actions, they are recorded in the console.
  

KITE helps with three main things:

1. user experience time
2. network time
3. cache network time (for repeat visitors)
   

You can download very deep into each page and each performance metric. Tests from Global Network are also possible where you can replay exactly the steps you made from your desktop from all supported areas (e.g. Atlanta).

KITE

• early adopter program
• starts in August 2008
• signup at http://kite.keynote.com
• KITE is FREE!

Great product. Definitely worth checking out.

Also see:

• KITE Presentation
• Velocity Product Launch: KITE by Steve Souders
• Announcing KITE for early adopters at Velocity by Keynote official blog