Not All End User Experience Monitoring Solutions are

NOT ALL END USER EXPERIENCE
MONITORING SOLUTIONS ARE
CREATED EQUAL
COMPARING ATERNITY TO FOUR OTHER END USER
EXPERIENCE MONITORING APPROACHES
COMPREHENSIVE VISIBILITY INTO
END USER EXPERIENCE MONITORING
REQUIRES A DEEPER LOOK
Although traditional
APM and device
monitoring products
provide some
aspects of End
User Experience
Monitoring, enterprise
IT Ops teams relying
on these solutions
can find themselves
blind to what their
workforce users are
actually experiencing.
End User Experience Monitoring goes
hand in hand with Application Performance
Management (APM). In its Magic Quadrant for
Application Performance Monitoring,1 Gartner
considers End User Experience Monitoring
the first of the five functional dimensions
necessary for enterprises to achieve the
objectives of APM. After all, analyzing the
performance of an application requires data
on how application parameters like availability,
latency, response time, and usability appear
to the end user. As a result, every leading
APM vendor includes End User Experience
Monitoring as part of its solution.
Physical and virtual device monitoring products include different aspects of End User
Experience Monitoring that are not covered by traditional APM vendors. By monitoring
events, processes, resource consumption, memory, and hard drive performance, these
products provide IT Ops a view into problem areas that potentially impact the experience
of their end users.
Although these products provide some aspects of End User Experience Monitoring,
enterprise IT Ops teams relying on these solutions can find themselves blind to what
their workforce users are actually experiencing as they use the full range of business
critical applications on mobile, virtual, and physical devices. Traditional APM and device
monitoring vendors leverage four approaches commonly found in the market to solve
some of the problems some of the time, but each has important limitations. Explaining
this conflict requires a deeper look at what other vendors classify as End User Experience
Monitoring.
1
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring, Jonah Kowall, Will Capelli, October 28, 2014, G00262851.
©2016 Aternity, Inc. All other trademarks or trade names are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
2
Synthetic monitoring
can proactively
identify application
availability and
execution issues, but
it knows nothing of
an organization’s end
users and their actual
experience.
Network-based
packet capture is
useful in security and
network management,
but becomes
expensive at higher
network speeds, fails
to capture actual
screen render time
or end user device
data, and cannot
monitor apps that
are not web-based or
activities that
don’t generate
network traffic.
1. Synthetic Monitoring
2. Network-Based
Packet Capture
Synthetic monitoring is an approach in
which a script is executed that emulates
users interacting with applications. The
scripts are run at periodic intervals
to proactively identify application
availability and execution issues before
End User Experience is impacted.
This approach is useful in determining
application availability and establishing
general performance baselines,
especially for applications that are not
accessed by real users 24 hours a day,
7 days a week. Synthetic Monitoring is
also valuable for applications that rely
on APIs to access third party services.
These solutions gather network-based
response time and error metrics from
the network, browser, or application
that impact End User Experience, such
as HTTP/HTTPS or other network
transactions on the wire, such as
TCP. This approach requires close
coordination with network engineers
to identify the optimum points in
the network to place the specialized
networking equipment required to
aggregate and filter traffic for analysis.
Although packet aggregation and
brokering gear can also be used for
security and network management, it
becomes exponentially more expensive
as network speeds increase.
However, this solution knows nothing
of an organization’s end users and their
actual experience. If an end user were
to call the service desk with a problem,
this solution would tell them nothing
about what the end user was actually
doing or experiencing. In addition, it
can be time-consuming to create and
maintain the scripts on which this
approach relies.
Network-based packet capture
solutions do not provide visibility into
the actual screen render time within
the browser or application, resulting in
cases of dubious End User Experience
reports. Web and network requests or
responses can go over the wire subsecond, but if there is heavy client-side
processing or a lot of data, the screen
within the browser or application
can take 10 seconds or more to
render. Apps delivered via cloud or
virtualization also present challenges
to this approach. This approach cannot
monitor the wide variety of enterprise
applications that are not web-based
or application activities that don’t
generate network traffic, such as
opening a cached email in MS Outlook.
Finally, these solutions provide no data
about what is happening on the user’s
device, which often correlates to user
experience.
©2016 Aternity, Inc. All other trademarks or trade names are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
3
JavaScript Injection
is useful for those
web and mobile
applications that are
under an enterprise’s
direct control, but
requires proxy servers
or load balancers for
other applications
hosted externally.
The metrics gathered
by device monitoring
provide no insight into
how end users are
actually experiencing
the applications
they use.
3. JavaScript Injection
4. Physical and Virtual
Device Monitoring
This solution injects JavaScript code
into a web application in order to get
timings of what is occurring within
a user’s browser. This approach can
include calls to 3rd party apps, so it gets
closer to the actual user’s experience,
but works only for web applications and
hybrid mobile apps.
In today’s converged, next generation
end user computing environment,
the workforce navigates seamlessly
between physical, virtual, and mobile
devices as they conduct business
using a broad portfolio of apps. Device
monitoring solutions monitor operating
system metrics like resource utilization
(CPU, memory, etc.) and health
(application crashes, blue screens, etc.),
which are certainly important factors
that can impact user experience. Device
monitoring has also become popular
in the VDI space for physical to virtual
assessments and for monitoring the
virtual desktop infrastructure.
JavaScript injection cannot provide
any correlating metrics about what’s
happening on the user’s device.
Monitoring applications that are hosted
outside of the control of the enterprise,
such as SaaS based applications,
requires JavaScript injection using
proxy servers or load balancers,
which adds complexity, expense,
and implementation challenges for
fragmented network topologies.
Device monitoring does not provide
any insight into how end users are
actually experiencing the applications
they use. When users call to complain
that the application in their VDI
environment is running slowly, they
are not complaining about device
metrics like CPU or memory. They
are complaining about their ability to
execute a business activity, like look up
patient, process an insurance claim, or
search a customer record.
©2016 Aternity, Inc. All other trademarks or trade names are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
4
ATERNITY CLOSES THE APM VISIBILITY GAP
By effectively
transforming every
device — mobile,
physical, or virtual —
into a self-monitoring
platform that is user
experience aware,
enterprises can
measure, manage, and
improve workforce
productivity for the full
range of applications in
the enterprise portfolio
delivered on any
device.
Thick Client
SaaS
Laptop
Desktop
Productivity
Web Apps
Tablet
Virtual Desktop
Java
A different approach is required to
close the visibility gap between your
workforce’s real user experience and
what application-centric APM tools or
device monitoring tools provide. The
problem is that you can’t accurately
measure End User Experience by
starting at the data center and looking
out. You have to start from the
perspective of the end user looking in.
Desktop
Virtualization
Aternity monitors any application on
any physical, virtual, or mobile device,
providing a user-centric vantage point
Application
Mobile
Virtualization
that closes the visibility gap existing with
traditional APM and device monitoring
tools. This approach uniquely provides a complete view of End User Experience and
device metrics correlated to that experience, for the full range of applications and devices
that the enterprise workforce relies on in today’s converged cloud, mobile, and virtual
environments.
Smartphone
Track workforce productivity across the full portfolio of apps used on all devices
©2016 Aternity, Inc. All other trademarks or trade names are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
5
REAL WORLD ASSESSMENT OF APPROACHES
TO END USER EXPERIENCE MONITORING
As enterprises adopt the constant stream of new business-critical applications
delivered via cloud or on premise, running on physical, virtual, and mobile devices, IT
must keep pace to ensure quality of service and workforce productivity. The following
table illustrates a side-by-side comparison of the approaches to End User Experience
Monitoring for seven common real world scenarios encountered by the enterprise
workforce. The table illustrates the advantages of Aternity. Instrumenting physical or
virtual devices with agents, or mobile apps with an SDK, uniquely provides a complete
view of End User Experience and device metrics correlated to that experience, for the
full range of applications and devices that the enterprise workforce relies on in today’s
converged cloud, mobile, and virtual environments.
MONITORING APPROACH
SCENARIO
SCENARIO
SCENARIO
SCENARIO
Synthetic
Monitoring
Network-Based
Packet Capture
JavaScript
Injection
Device
Monitoring
Agent On End
User Device
Opening Cached
Email in Outlook
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No user activity
• Device resource
metrics, not
correlated to user
activity
• Time for email content to
render on user’s screen,
compared to baselines
• Device metrics correlated
to user activity
Searching For
Patient Record in
EHR App (e.g.
Cerner)
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No user activity
• TCP packets for the
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No user activity
• Device resource
• Time for patient record
content to render on user’s
screen, compared to
baselines
• Device metrics correlated
to user activity
Executing SAP
Transaction Code
(e.g. VA01
Create Sales
Order)
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No user activity
• TCP packets and BAPI
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No user activity
• Device resource
• Time for transaction
content to render on user’s
screen, compared to
baselines
• Device metrics correlated
to user activity
Saving Record in
Web App (e.g.
Siebel)
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• Web request /
• Web page activity
• TCP traffic for POST/GET
• No device metrics
response time
• No user activity
• Device resource
• Time for record to be
saved, as seen on user’s
screen, compared to
baselines
• Device metrics correlated
to user activity
Opening Record
in SaaS App (e.g.
Servicenow)
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• Web request /
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No user activity
• Device resource
• Time for record to be
opened, as seen on user’s
screen, compared to
baselines
• Device metrics correlated
to user activity
Opening
Document in
Virtualized
Environment
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• No activity for
• Time for document to be
opened, as seen on user’s
screen, compared to
baselines
• VDI device metrics
correlated to user activity
Opening Screen
on Mobile
Workforce App
(e.g. Salesforce
Automation)
• No user activity
• No device metrics
activity, but no device
metrics
calls for the activity, but
no device metrics
response pairs
transactions on the wire,
but no device metrics
response pairs
• TCP traffic for POST/GET
transactions on the wire,
but no device metrics
• No user activity
• No device metrics
metrics, not
correlated to user
activity
metrics, not
correlated to user
activity
metrics, not
correlated to user
activity
metrics, not
correlated to user
activity
that user
• Resource metrics
for the VDI device
the user was
using
• No user activity
• No device metrics
• Web page activity
response time if
web-based app
• No device metrics
• No activity for
that user
• Resource metrics
for the mobile
device
• Time for screen to render
on the device, compared to
baselines
• Mobile device metrics
correlated to user activity
©2016 Aternity, Inc. All other trademarks or trade names are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
6
ENTERPRISES USE ATERNITY SIDE BY SIDE
WITH TRADITIONAL APM PRODUCTS TO
DRIVE BUSINESS RESULTS ACROSS THE FULL
PORTFOLIO OF ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS
Aternity’s unique
approach to End
User Experience
Management
complements
traditional APM
products that address
other dimensions
of APM, such as
application topology
discovery, application
component deep
dive, and IT
Operations Analytics
(ITOA) for certain
classes of applications
like web and mobile.
Enterprises use Aternity to ensure quality of service for the full portfolio of business
critical applications delivered over mobile, web, virtual, cloud, or physical environments,
side by side with traditional APM products. Aternity’s unique approach to End User
Experience Management complements traditional APM products that address other
dimensions of APM, such as application topology discovery, application component deep
dive, and IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) for certain classes of applications like web and
mobile. Together, Aternity and traditional APM products deliver extensive benefits to
enterprise application developers, IT Ops, and the line of business.
IT Ops Expands Support to the Entire App Portfolio
IT Ops leverages End User Experience Management of workforce applications such as
productivity applications, public-cloud based applications, Thick Client applications, and
applications delivered via Citrix and other virtual desktop technologies, to extend their
service assurance capabilities beyond custom-developed, consumer-facing web, and
mobile applications to the complete enterprise portfolio.
The Line of Business Gains Insight into Workforce Productivity
The line of business gains complete insight into the impact of the performance of the full
enterprise application portfolio on the productivity of their tech-dependent workforce,
in addition to the impact of the performance of consumer-facing web applications on
revenue and customer satisfaction. Aternity’s expanded view of the enterprise end user is
what enables enterprises to measure, manage, and improve workforce productivity.
• Rather than the anonymous consumer executing transactions on a web application,
the enterprise end user has a meaningful identity consisting of not just a name, but a
role, department, and office location within the organization.
• Rather than the individual, ad-hoc transactions executed by consumers, the
enterprise end user conducts a range of business activities throughout the day, on
multiple devices - physical, virtual, and mobile — from a variety of locations.
• Rather than the simple transactions which consumers execute on web applications,
the applications used by the workforce may be part of a complex user workflow,
consisting of a sequence of business activities, often spanning multiple applications.
©2016 Aternity, Inc. All other trademarks or trade names are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
7
User Interactions
Business Activities
START
Edit Account
Click
Submit
SUBMIT
Edit Account
SUBMIT
IDENTIFICATION
Edit Account
Successfully
Submitted
SUBMIT
SUCCESSFULLY SUBMITTED
SUCCESSFULLY SUBMITTED
SUCCESSFULLY SUBMITTED
Network Interactions
UNAVAILABLE
COMPLETE
INCOMPLETE
Transaction
Failed
Successfully
Submitted
Click
Submit
Reporting
https://na3.salesforce.com/088850000021z2JvHTTP Requests
https://na3.salesforce.com/secur/frontdoor.jsp?sid=00D0009000005sly%21AR0AQA796UcDRiH3GyaVsrIcah6ne
PNxuGScWpagHbAj9RtYu3oFD0EhXlMTieMvSstlmXqtIGXwSoQZCYqWCmoaX1Y89Mfb&retURL=%2Fhome%2
Fhome.jsp&apv=1&cshc=0000002RIzW00000005sly&display=touch
http://customer.aternity.com/MSPWeb/IDXWF/HTXX.htm
SELECT * FROM TAB1, TAB2 WHERE TAB1.KEY=TAB2.KEY AND TAB1.
NAME=:mynameUPDATE RECORD SET VAL=322234323 WHERE KEY=AA
SS1213INSERT INTO TAB1 (VAL, NAME, ID, RES) AS SELECT * FROM TAB2
37.229.18.10337.229.18.10337.22937.229.18.10337.229.18.10337.229.18.1
29.18.10337.22937.229.18.10337.22937.229.18.10337.22937.229.18.1033
37.229.18.10337.229.18.10337.22937.229.18.10337.229.18.10337.229.18.
29.18.10337.22937.229.18.10337.229.18.10337.229.18.10337.229.18229.1
Enterprises can define user interactions with applications in the context
of a business workflow to provide business context
Empowered by these capabilities, the enterprise line of business can address the
following key use cases.
• Determining whether or not SLAs are being met, by analyzing business activity
performance by geography, department, and device type
• Validating expected gains in productivity by comparing business activities over time,
by department, and across mobile and wired devices
• Verifying application performance is maintained after migrating to a centralized
virtual infrastructure, by comparing performance on virtual and physical devices
• Holding cloud providers and outsourcers accountable to SLA targets, by measuring
End User Experience across geographies and business locations
• Cost justifying the investment to upgrade to the data center or desktops, by
reporting the financial impact of lost productivity
Determine whether or not SLAs are being met by analyzing business activity
performance by geography, department, and device type
©2016 Aternity, Inc. All other trademarks or trade names are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
8
CONCLUSION
Only Aternity, with
its comprehensive
approach to End
User Experience
Management across
any application
delivered on any
device, enables IT
Ops and the line of
business to measure,
manage, and
improve workforce
productivity.
Aternity — Comprehensive End User Experience Monitoring
Optimizes Productivity of the Tech-dependent Workforce
As enterprises develop and roll out ever more applications to drive their businesses, IT
Ops must keep pace with the complexity of assuring their reliability and developing
insights into the impact of application performance on the business. The line of business
needs assurance that strategic initiatives like mobility, cloud, and virtualization deliver the
expected benefits to the business. Only Aternity, with its comprehensive approach to End
User Experience Management across any application delivered on any device, enables IT
Ops and the line of business to measure, manage, and improve
workforce productivity.
Implement as SaaS or On-premise
Aternity provides a SaaS or on-premise platform for ensuring the reliability of any
business-critical application running on mobile, virtual, and physical devices.
Request a free product evaluation: www.aternity.com/products/free-trial/
About Aternity
For nine years, Aternity has helped enterprises see the entire workforce experience
on any application running on any device, providing a user-centric vantage point
that closes the visibility gap existing with network- and server-centric application
performance management tools. By effectively transforming every device — physical,
virtual, and mobile — into a self-monitoring platform that is user experience aware,
enterprises are empowered with user-centric, proactive IT management capabilities
that dramatically reduce business disruptions and increase workforce productivity.
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©2016 Aternity, Inc. All other trademarks or trade names are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
9