Two start-up companies, Andromedia and WebThreads plan to announce new management tools next week that promise to help Webmasters track site visitors more precisely.

Andromedia will unveil the Aria WWW Recording and Reporting System to let Webmasters take a snapshot of site traffic at any given moment and to follow individuals as they surf through the site to get a more accurate picture of how their sites are used. The system has been designed to handle up to 10 million hits per day and can monitor one or several Web servers.

Aria works with Web servers from Netscape Communications running on Sun Microsystems' hardware. When the system ships in the third quarter, pricing will start at $1,800 but could go as high as $35,000.

WebThreads will release the first beta version of its system Monday that will also focus on tracking individual movements through a site, according to Yermo Lamers, the product's developer. Pricing for the system will start at $895, but the company has not yet set a final release date.

"This software is easy to use for a particular audience. We want to provide programming-like capabilities to people with HTML experience," Landers said, adding that WebThreads works on any server.

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