Real Time User Experience Monitoring in the Cloud

What is End User Experience, you may ask..it is lately getting a lot of importance by anybody and everybody providing a web based application with mid to large user base. It is measuring the end user's experience on the website, how is the performance of the application, how easy is the navigation of the application, what is the drop rate of customers / users. 


Historically, the end user monitoring was done via Synthetic Transactions - simulating how an end user would behave after logging on to a website via a script that executes certain functions on the website. However, it is not easy to predict each and every step that a user will take / perform on a website & therefore impossible to know what  a real user’s experience is with an application by using just a synthetic transaction monitor.

This led to the rise of Real Time User Experience Monitoring that helps companies to understand what is actually going on within the client side application (browser based, or proprietary thick client) of the end user. So you will ask, why is it so difficult to measure the Real Time End User Experience? So here you go..many major companies have moved their application functionality to the web. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) written in Ajax, Adobe Flex, Adobe Flash, HTML5 have become the norm. In RIA applications one cannot tell what is happening to the user by watching the protocol stream at the web server (as you can with a simple HTTP web application). Furthermore, the smart phone and the tablet platforms have emerged as true application platforms for business critical applications and are being adopted by many companies. Since users are going to be accessing business critical applications with these devices, and some of these applications will be SaaS or cloud delivered, then client side agents and therefore Real Time User Monitoring will be the only viable approach to monitoring the performance of these applications to their users. 

So who are the key players in this niche market?

Company	Product	Description (Taken From Vendor Site)
CA Technologies	Customer Experience Manager	CA Wily CEM focuses on identifying and prioritizing problems that affect end-user service quality by analyzing individual transactions in real-time; providing customized real-time dashboard displays that give you the information needed to make quick, accurate decisions; enabling business-based prioritization of problem resolution; and displaying information needed by both IT and business owners to work together to meet Service Level Agreements and deliver an optimum enduser experience.
CorrelSense	Real User Monitoring	SharePath RUM (real user monitoring) Express provides a real-time view into the actual experience of your end-user, including availability, response times and service levels. This free, enterprise-class software helps isolate problems and pinpoint bottlenecks in your data center, network, or online application.
BMC Software	End User Experience Management	Reduce the time, effort, and cost involved with monitoring dynamic applications by providing both IT and the business with real-time insight into application performance and its impact on user behavior — across physical and cloud environments, the internet, corporate networks, content delivery networks (CDNs), and mobile devices. This was earlier called Coradiant and came with the acquisition.
HP Software	Real User Monitor	HP Real User Monitor software passively monitors application performance and availability for all users at all locations all the time. It automatically discovers underlying infrastructure and classifies user actions—giving you instant visibility into session health. It allows you to trace user experience across tiers to quickly isolate application issues, capture live sessions, see where customers clicked, measure response times and see pages that caused problems. And you can easily capture and replay sessions to create test scripts that reflect real behavior.
IBM	Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Transactions	ITCAM for Transactions provides an agentless Web response monitoring component with the ability to dynamically switch monitoring levels. The Web response monitoring component allows you to adopt an end user’s perspective when measuring transaction performance. End-user response time is filtered down to specific transactions by time, user ID, or session.
Oracle	Real User Experience Insight	Oracle Real User Experience Insight enables enterprises to maximize the value of their business-critical applications by delivering insight into real end-user experiences. It can help identify lost revenue from frustrated users, reduce support costs by lowering call center volumes, accelerate problem resolution of poorly performing applications, and help businesses adapt to changing needs by providing insight into business trends and user preferences.
Tealeaf	Customer Experience Management	Tealeaf's solutions are used by customer-centric organizations to build a true online customer experience competency across the enterprise. From ebusiness and IT, to customer service and compliance, Tealeaf provides the common "view" of the online customer enabling organizations to understand how to deliver better online solutions and provide more effective service for their customers.
Quest Software	Foglight User Experience Management	Foglight® User Experience Management solutions help you understand and improve the experience users and customers have when interacting with your web applications. Proactively managing the user experience will help you identify performance issues, understand user and customer behavior, and improve web application performance.
Opnet	AppResponse Xpert	AppResponse Xpert is an appliance-based solution that monitors and analyzes end-user experience for all levels of transactions. It also supports in-depth monitoring and analysis of the underlying network, a domain that is vital to comprehensive APM.
Aternity	Frontline Performance Intelligence & Real User Experience Management	Frontline Performance Intelligence is the result of the real-time aggregation, analysis, correlation of all the performance metrics that define and impact real end user experience. By transforming end user experience metrics into actionable business intelligence, Frontline Performance Intelligence becomes a strategic business enabler.
Knoa Software	End-User Experience and Performance Management	Knoa's vision for EPM starts with monitoring application performance from the end-user perspective. Knoa's User Sensing Technology captures the end-user's interaction with an application at the GUI level rather than the transaction level, so it really measures true "end-user response time" and the actual "end-user experience."

So friends, look these guys up and see what they have to provide that suits your requirements & budget and get the best out of it...

Have fun monitoring your customers real user experience and see your revenues soar!

Cloud Apps Performance Management & Quantum Physics

What? Quantum Physics…how is it related to the Cloud and more so, Performance Management for Cloud based applications?

Cloud Computing facilitates businesses to dynamically consume & utilize IT resources (hardware, software) based on their needs thereby reducing significant capital expenses. But how does the performance of cloud applications affect the end users of these businesses?

You guessed it right – Quantum Physics is where the answer lies! The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties of sub-atomic particles, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. That is, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured. Oh God, this is too scientific to understand!

In simple terms for you and me to understand, Werner Heisenberg figured out in 1927, that it is impossible to determine simultaneously both the position and the momentum of an electron or any other sub-atomic particle with any great degree of accuracy or certainty. Taking this analogy to the Cloud, the virtualized resources, both hardware and software, are similar to sub-atomic particles & waves in Quantum Physics – it is impossible to precisely know where there position is (a.k.a. location) and how fast or slow their momentum (a.k.a. performance) is from an End User perspective!

What is the problem here?
As we all know, a cloud application may have multiple virtual layers between itself and the hardware that it resides on. It could be clustered across many application servers installed on a bunch of virtual servers spanning multiple physical nodes and spread out across various data centers across the globe! To measure the performance of the various layers in the Cloud Apps, metrics need to be captured on an extended time scale with performance / infrastructure baseline. But, these cloud configurations can dynamically change & reshuffled as the Cloud resources are adjusted based on usage & requirements. So the baseline keeps fluctuating making it near impossible to predict where Performance issues are from an End User perspective!

And how do you measure it?
So as an end user of a Cloud App, the critical metric to look at is YOUR experience of a Transaction for a service that a Cloud vendor delivers. The transaction is the glue that unifies and lays out the key properties that can be used to measure the effectiveness of a Service delivery and also indicate the quantum properties that contribute to the issues.

So what is the future of Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?
Gartner defines Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solution for 2010 as the integration of the five functional dimensions:
• End User Experience Monitoring
• Discovery & Modeling of Application Runtime Architecture
• User Defined Transaction Profiling
• Application Component Deep Dive Monitoring
• Analysis & Correlation of Data Sets generated by the above 4 dimensions

Gartner goes on to say that by 2015, 50% of the enterprises will need capabilities beyond those delivered by the current APM tools (5 dimensional approach stated above) to manage a complex and dynamic infrastructure & application environment!

Management of Cloud Apps Performance will require newer strategies & approaches as the apps on the public cloud & private cloud integrate & intertwine with each other. These approaches will have to identify slow end user transactions & trace them across the various layers & tiers of hardware & software to deep dive into the root cause. These future strategies & approaches are further elaborated by Gartner in their model for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) 2015 that extends the APM 2010.

What are the BMC Software's Offerings in the APM 2015 space?
BMC is on the leading edge of the Applications Performance Monitoring space for 2015. Key products & solutions are lined up in each of Gartner’s APM 2015 area.

1. Policy & Orchestration Engine – BMC Atrium Orchestrator bridges people, process, and technology to automate manual, repetitive tasks across IT, enabling better support for business. Defines automated processes that are built on best-practice standards to ensure compliance with policies, Automates routine tasks, Scales automation to the scope and size your business demands, Orchestrates cross functional IT operations activities across internal and third-party solutions environments. This is the glue for the BMC Cloud Solution.
2. Application Behavior Learning – BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management solution (BPPM) automates prioritization of events based on predictive service impact analysis, Delivers early warning of impending problems, while eliminating reliance on reactive thresholds and realizing up to a 90% reduction in false events with patented predictive analytics, Automatically pinpoints predictive root cause across infrastructure, applications, and services, Automatically and uniformly maps, monitors and tracks relationships and behavior across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
3. Crowdsourcing & Collaboration - Various components of the BMC Product Portfolio contribute to this space dedicated to collaboration and crowdsourcing. BMC Atrium Orchestrator, BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management & BMC Atrium CMDB come together to enable enterprises to capture and apply knowledge to manage a diverse & heterogeneous infrastructure & application environment.
4. Cloud Enablement – BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution, which is a fine integration of key BMC solutions using BMC Service Request Management, BMC ITSM, BMC Bladelogic Server Automation, BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, BMC Atrium CMDB and BMC Atrium Orchestrator provides it a unique advantage in the Cloud Enablement space. This solution supports multiple cloud environments, helps to monitor, manage & administer applications & infrastructure in public, private & hybrid clouds.
5. Cost Allocation & Chargeback – With BMC IT Business Management Suite, following capabilities are provided: Demand and Resource Management, Financial Planning and Budgeting, IT Controls Management, Service Cost Management & Supplier Management. This brings in a transaction transparency added with resource usage and associated cost information.

This highlights the tremendous scope & potential of the Cloud Apps Performance Management tools & technologies to cater to the Cloud Applications Performance Management challenges corroborated by Quantum Physics!