Any ideas about GomezAgent+1.0 ?

Need some help locating info on this user agent

[Colin]

5% of last months traffic list GomezAgent+1.0 as the user agent. I can't find any details about this agent. Anyone seen this?
There is a performance site called Gomez.com but I can't reach anyone there.
Any help appreciated.

[oilman]

Hi Colin - Welcome to WMW.

Do you have an IP address to go alone with that little sucker?

[Colin]

I have 19 different IPs from today. Today alone, 6 1/2% of site traffic is logged with GomezAgent+1.0 as the user agent.
Here are some of the IPs. Half the IPs resolve to Gomez Associates and the rest seem to be Verio, UUNet Etc.

208.45.137.30
63.251.169.138
64.240.101.210
194.129.73.27
213.11.170.11
129.250.184.202

Thanks,

[oilman]

It appears that gomezpro.com runs some sort of Performance Analysis system. I requested a performance analysis of one of my sites and sure enough GomezAgent showed up.

Likely several companies have signed up for this service and use it monitor performance of competitor sites etc.

I'd simply block the agent via htaccess. Quick and simple. It doesn't appear that there is any benefit to letting it crawl your site unless you have performance issues and you're the one who requested it.

[Colin]

OK, I am pretty sure that this traffic is coming from Gomez.com even though we have not requested that they benchmark our site.
There is a list of their points of prescence located at:
[gpn.gomez.com...]
Many of the IPs in my log file reverse back to the ISPs listed on the Gomez page - Cable and Wireless, Verio, UUNet, Savvis, Level 3, Etc.
I will go ahead an block this traffic.
Thanks,