Keynote Announces Updated Red Alert Service for Faster Online Problem Identification and Notification.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 9, 2001

New Version Offers Five-Minute Monitoring;

Integration With Enterprise Perspective

Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority(R), today announced an update to Red Alert(TM), 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(TM) 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 4,000 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(R), 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(TM) family of services benchmarks and assures the performance of Web page downloads, transactions and audio and video streams. KeyReadiness(TM) 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. The company can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650/522-1000.

Note to press: Call Keynote's media hotline at 650/522-1234 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 [e-mail] and specify your press affiliation.

The Internet Performance Authority, Red Alert, and Perspective are either 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.