End User Experience Monitoring – Beyond Application Speed and Availability

End User Experience Today (Jul 15 2010) Thought Leadership

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   Submitted by: Bojan Simic, Principal Analyst at TRAC Research

   A number of products in the market include the term “end-user monitoring” in their positioning. However, some of these products are significantly different in terms of the metrics that are able to capture the quality of end-user experience for enterprise applications. In terms of Key Performance Indicators (KPI), there are four groups of measurements that these products can track:

   • Application speed. Metrics include application response times, transaction response times and page load times
   • Application availability
   • The business impact of application performance. Metrics include the number of users impacted, value of failed transactions
   • Application usage. Metrics include application feature usage, page views, browser operations

   
   The majority of end-user monitoring products are capturing more traditional application performance metrics, such as speed and availability at the application level. However, end-user organizations are investing millions of dollars in business-critical applications and the first thing that CIOs need to know is what they are getting out of these investments. Measuring the speed and availability of applications and monitoring log-in data will not get this done. Organizations need to have a good understanding of how application performance is impacting key business processes, how applications are being used and what the severity of performance issues is from a business perspective.

   
   I came across many companies that are attributing ineffectiveness of their application performance monitoring initiatives to a “human factor”. Typically, they would describe the “human factor” as employees changing the workflow of business processes that they should be following due to applications that are performing poorly. If business users avoid using the application because of issues with its performance, both IT and business decision makers have to be aware of that. Additionally, understanding if the application is not being used because it is not performing well or just because it is difficult to use is of critical importance. Also, if end-user monitoring dashboards are showing “spikes” in the performance of an application, it is important to know if these problems are impacting 2 users or 2,000. In many cases, this information is not available to IT teams.
   In order to truly evaluate what the quality of end-user experience is, organizations need to see beyond average application response times and availability and also monitor the following:

   • Who is interacting with applications and how often
   • What features within the application are being used and how each of them are performing
   • How severe are application performance issues from the business perspective
   • What is the correlation between application performance and key utilization metrics

   
   Many organizations are still struggling to measure the business impact of their application performance management initiatives. One of the key reasons for this is that many organizations do not have visibility into how issues with application performance are impacting workflows of key business processes. Being able to monitor applications for more than just speed and availability would allow organizations to demystify the “human factor” aspect of their management initiatives and have full visibility into the alignment of their application performance management efforts with business goals.
   

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