In-Depth

User story: At EBSCO

• By Rich Seeley
• January 1, 2004

Seeking a tool to help monitor its B2B and e-Commerce Web apps for security issues and system errors, EBSCO Industries, Birmingham, Ala., installed TeaLeaf Technology's RealiTea.

Since the RealiTea Web app management tool was installed in April 2003, it has proved easy to implement, and training developers to use it takes two hours or less, said Tony Webster, manager, information systems at EBSCO. RealiTea captures each user's session and allows it to be played back so that a Web administrator, designer or developer can see how the user was interacting with the app when a problem occurred. EBSCO provides online and print journal subscription services, book sales, and other services to a customer base made up of corporate and university users.

''Unfortunately, we're not immune to hack attempts,'' Terry Webster, Web manager at EBSCO, said of the company's Web apps.

There was a hack attempt shortly after the TeaLeaf tool was installed, he explained, and he was pleased with how the tool uncovered a security vulnerability. ''This problem was in such a hidden area of the system,'' Terry Webster said. ''It would have taken an engineer months to determine where the hack attempt was coming from. We were able to determine when the hack attempts were happening. We went into our TeaLeaf sessions, pulled out all sessions during that period and looked for things that were not normal.''

As Terry Webster explained, ''You can play back the sessions just like you were watching a VCR of somebody's browser experience. We found a part of our site that was exposed. It allowed us to resolve that problem quickly.''

Tony Webster said that since installing the TeaLeaf tool problems that might cause a user to abandon a transaction have been resolved in as little as two hours. One of the best practices he recommends for TeaLeaf users is to configure RealiTea e-mail alerts so that they go directly to the IS staffers responsible for an app.

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