Keynote's Keynote Internet Testing Environment, or KITE, is a desktop application for testing the performance of Web sites. While KITE is aimed primarily at Web application developers, it caught my interest as a tool for measuring the performance of an organization's current or prospective software-as-a-service-based applications.

I tested KITE Version 2.0, which began shipping in August. I used KITE to create scripts of typical operations with a few Web-based SAAS applications, and then ran those scripts both from my local machine and from a collection of Keynote's global monitoring sites. I was impressed with the granular performance information the product yielded after a short period of use.

To examine and measure rich application functionality—such as through AJAX—I had to make some script modifications as described in Keynote's online product documentation.

KITE is freely downloadable, and KITE scripts can be run either from the desktop and network on which the software is installed, or through Keynote points of presence in San Francisco; New York; Frankfurt, Germany; London; and Hong Kong. For San Francisco, there's a second point of presence that measures Web application performance over a DSL link to provide a reading on the impact of a user's last-mile connection on the test application.

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