Jul 9, 2001 : Keynote Announces Updated Red Alert

📅 July 9, 2001 - Keynote Systems (keynote.com), today announced an update to Red Alert, its up/down real-time Internet monitoring service, that now testsdevices connected to the Internet every five minutes. Red Alert customerscan now choose five-minute monitoring to test the availability of anyInternet server or other TCP enabled Internet device.

All Red Alert events are also integrated in Keynote's new EnterprisePerspective service, allowing real-time up/down alarms to be easily assignedand managed through the customer's existing enterprise management console.
Research indicates that many accessibility failures cannot be detectedlocally, since the problem is often located in another device or some otherpiece of the infrastructure between the server and the end user, and not theserver itself. Keynote's Red Alert service constantly monitors theavailability of its customers' mission-critical networks, servers andapplications from an end-user perspective, sending immediate alarmsidentifying both error type and IP address within the notification, allowingbusinesses to minimize downtime.
"There is increasing pressure on IT professionals not only to minimizedowntime, but also to prove the return on investment for infrastructureexpenditures,'' said Matt Parks, director of product management for Keynote."The only way to do that is to have access to fast and accurate data aboutthe performance and availability of systems which allows for immediatetriage by the right person."
A recent study the University of California estimated that nearly 4,000Denial of Service (DoS) attacks per week are launched against commercial andhome computers, and that two to three percent of all DoS attacks studiedtargeted domain name servers. Because Red Alert monitors name servers andnetwork gateways, IT departments can monitor DoS attacks against a domainname server from outside their network, allowing for identification andtriage before DNS caches begin to expire.
"It can be difficult to detect a DoS attack from inside your firewall," saidLloyd Taylor, vice president of technology and operations for KeynoteSystems. "In many cases, DoS attacks can fill your pipe to the Internetwithout saturating your Web servers. If you are sharing bandwidth withother companies (such as in a hosting facility) an attack on another websitecan take yours down, without any noticeable problems on your website."
Red Alert five-minute monitoring is priced at $59.95 per device/per monthwith the availability of other enhanced services such as Autotrace andgateway monitoring, priced starting at 9.95 per device/per month.