End-user Experience Measurement
IT administrators and operations managers face an increasingly difficult challenge in ensuring that applications are available and perform at acceptable levels. Compuware Vantage provides a solution: proactive service level management (SLM) that monitors application performance and the end-user experience.
Vantage has two proven methods that address different kinds of critical end-user monitoring needs. These methods are complementary and often used in combination with each other and other Vantage solutions:
- Agentless monitoring measures the application response times experienced by every user of every application. It passively collects data from anywhere in your network from an easy-to-maintain centralized location.
- Active monitoring lets you gauge the response times for key business applications against established thresholds, using dedicated workstations replaying scripted transactions. Active agents represent predictable users in a known environment performing measurements at scheduled intervals, therefore providing "control" measurements.
With end-user experience monitoring, you can:
- proactively monitor all users all the time so you can detect and fix performance problems before end users even know about them
- improve application service and increase end-user satisfaction
- align IT with business objectives and improve communication
- make IT more efficient and cost effective
- precisely locate which application component is at fault—whether it's front-end, application servers, middleware or database
- prioritize performance problems based on the number of affected users
- establish and maintain realistic service level arrangements (SLAs) and know where SLAs are not going to be met
- accelerate application performance problem resolution and eliminate finger pointing
- notify key personnel automatically when there are application service-level exceptions
- create comprehensive application performance reports with real-time, baseline and trend statistics.
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End-user Experience |
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Know your end user and be able to prove it
Technical specialists usually start from scratch collecting performance data with methods that are time-consuming and ad hoc, such as using a manual stopwatch, or writing custom programs to record application response times.
Vantage monitors critical transactions exactly as the end user executes them at a specific workstation, collecting and storing data including user ID, location, start of transaction, time completed, or data stating the transaction did not complete. You also can set up an active transaction so response time measurements are not influenced by non-critical applications on the workstation and do not include unnecessary user pauses and think time.
The active monitoring feature plays back the scripted transactions, including all of the screen, keyboard and mouse interactions exactly as they were recorded initially. IT managers can prove to end users how the response time was measured and verify whether recorded transactions realistically simulate actual user behavior.
Agentless monitoring, on the other hand, passively collects data from a switch port or tap anywhere on your network using an Agentless Monitoring Device (AMD). The AMD delivers web page performance information to Vantage from a centralized location without the need to pre-install agents or transaction definitions on end-user workstations.
Agentless monitoring allows you to see all users–internal workers, remote workers, business partners and customers–on a 24x7 basis. And, because of its passive nature, agentless monitoring introduces no additional load to the application infrastructure and the AMD requires minimal administrative support.
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Enterprise Dashboard with Business Impact Monitor |
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URL Performance Overview |
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Prioritize and assign troubleshooting resources
Vantage lets you tailor performance information into a format that provides a high-level view of what's happening across the system. With a glance, you can determine where you need to focus troubleshooting efforts and quickly assign the right person to the job.
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Enterprise Performance Summary |
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Determine scope and impact of application performance problems
Vantage lets you view performance from a variety of angles to determine the extent of a problem and its effect on application performance. With its interactive heat charts, you can tailor performance summary information by application, location, transaction, designated user roles or specified timeframes to decide where troubleshooting resources should focus their efforts first.
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Heat Charts |
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Trend for early problem detection
Vantage makes it easy to assess and address application performance problems as they emerge. It offers a special view into performance data to help you understand at what points applications perform poorly. Vantage uses an uncomplicated color-coding system to indicate how transactions are performing. The Client-Network-Server (CNS) trend report shows how much time transactions spend on each system component, and reveals how well an application interacts with its infrastructure as the rate of transactions executing increases. With this information, you can track transactions over time and resolve performance problems long before they impact end users.
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CNS Trend Report |
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Proactively monitor end-users
Get detailed reports on end-user experience, with collection and storage of data including user ID, location, the time the transaction started, the time completed, or data stating the transaction did not complete. You can:
- monitor critical transactions exactly as executed by the user
- set up synthetic transactions so measurements are not influenced by non-critical applications or user pauses
- demonstrate user response times
- play back scripted transactions for verification.
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Application Scorecard |
Hourly Transaction Scorecard | |
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Achieve realistic service level agreements
Both the IT department and the end user must share a common understanding of what a service level agreement (SLA) really means in terms of availability and performance. Vantage provides application performance baseline information that is meaningful to end users and IT managers, with multiple views, summaries and drill-down data points for further detail when needed.
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Application Availability and Performance |
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Get to the root cause
The transaction diagnostic capture feature of Vantage continuously captures detailed point-in-time diagnostic data and creates troubleshooting reports whenever a transaction exceeds the performance threshold value. It initiates a transaction communication trace, analyzing the data and creating a report if the service-level threshold is exceeded.
The resource-monitoring capability of Vantage captures critical performance measurements on the end-user workstation. These metrics include CPU utilization, disk storage, memory usage and network activity.
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CNS Exception |
Latency | |
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Get insight into web application performance
The Vantage Analysis Server (VAS) complements the integration of an agentless monitoring solution by focusing analysis on overall web site performance. In addition to the traditional Vantage business model entities (application, location, transaction and role), VAS examines web page delivery performance by location, as well as hierarchy of Internet topology or connection speed. In each of these perspectives, VAS presents user information in context of actual user names.
To speed the understanding of performance bottlenecks, VAS ties end-user service metrics to network performance characteristics. Interactive reports provide near real-time visibility of all user traffic to monitored web sites. VAS recognizes and counts all real web site users. VAS shows page load time, server time, HTTP response time, redirect time, loss rate, RTT and realized bandwidth associated with web page performance. A graphical web site activity map enhances presentation for complex web sites, showing which servers serve which applications and URLs, as well as the performance they deliver and their overall usage.
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URL Performance Overview |
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For deeper analysis, the Vantage Advanced Web Diagnostics Server (AWDS) includes diagnostics that help troubleshoot specific user problems and diagram web page delivery time, showing timings for each individual web object. For rapid fault domain isolation, AWDS builds an analytical model of the web site performance in order to find systemic problems that cause HTTP-based application performance degradation. It then quantifies the impact and severity in clear terms. This helps IT to focus on addressing those web site problems that are most severe, as well as assigning the right person to the job.
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Business Transaction Overview |
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Slow Page Load | |
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Get an end-to-end view of web transaction performance
Vantage quickly identifies web pages suffering from long server-processing times. Both agent-based and agentless end-user monitoring solutions link to complete server-side visibility provided by Vantage Analyzer, Compuware's deep-dive performance analysis solution for .NET and Java. With Vantage Analyzer, it's easy to drill down and see the performance of the thread responsible for serving a particular web page. Further object and method-level analysis tells you exactly where the server spent time serving a page and which back-end systems and operations slowed down the processing of the end user's request. The result? An end-to-end view of web transaction performance unmatched in the industry.
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End-to-end view of web transaction performance | |
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Support diverse environments
IT organizations that have implemented SAP, Citrix and 3270 applications need to be able to monitor and report on the performance and availability of their systems. Vantage provides unique monitoring capabilities designed for these specialized environments.
The Vantage SAP monitoring wizard walks a user through the definition of an SAP monitoring script that can detect the SAP-specific interactions. These scripts can then be used to passively monitor response times when end users execute SAP transactions.
Flexible Vantage definition rules make it possible to accomplish transaction monitoring by defining and monitoring Citrix and 3270 end-user interaction within the window. The transactions can be replayed at intervals to test for availability, or used to monitor actual response times on an end user's workstation.
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SAP Event |
Threshold Definition |
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Get a custom view of your production environment
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Map |
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