Direct monitoring of the end user experience has been shown to be the ultimate way of determining how well a business service is being delivered to customers.
Infrastructure monitoring alone, regardless of how comprehensive, cannot achieve the same level of visibility into how the service is being delivered to the consumer as direct monitoring of the end user experience.
While infrastructure monitoring is important, it is the end user monitoring that provides the context as to how infrastructure events actually impact the users. This is a key principle underpinning the concept of Business Service Management (BSM) which places the priority on monitoring and managing the overall service that is being delivered as opposed to the traditional approach of monitoring and managing individual infrastructure components.
With the BSM approach business objectives and end-user requirements drive priorities and implementing monitoring solutions from the perspective of end user experience enables organisations to proactively view service availability and performance, enabling them to identify problems that actually affect customers.
There are a number of dimensions to measuring end user experience of applications and services, with each having their own benefits and specific applications:
- Synthetic Monitoring
By simulating business transactions and business processes, this solution is able to provide a consistent, predictable measurement of performance and availability, whether or not real users are using the application at that time. By executing these transactions from different points of presence, synthetic monitoring can provide early warning of problems prior to customers experiencing them in addition to signs of degradation in performance, thus allowing remedial action to be taken at the earliest possible time. - Real User Monitoring
This technology provides critical insight into real user experiences and behaviours as usage of common applications can vary dramatically. The benefits of this technology are many, from being able to monitor business transactions that otherwise would be difficult to monitor synthetically to being able to record actual process steps being undertaken by real users to input into help desk or development activities.
By combining the use of synthetic and real user monitoring in an enterprise monitoring strategy, organisations are able to get a far deeper understanding of how their customers are dealing in the real world. By detecting potential issues before they become customer problems, organisations that have implemented this technology have become far more proactive and reduce calls into the IT help desk.
Our end user focused approach to enterprise monitoring, combined with other forms of IT monitoring, is guided by several key principles:
- Measuring and monitoring from an end-user perspective
- Correlating end-user behaviour with infrastructure metrics
- Tailoring the presentation of monitoring data to the needs of specific groups
- Providing real-time alerting
- Prioritising issues based on customer impact
- Facilitating rapid root cause analysis by presenting a combination of customer experience and infrastructure metrics