In my May 2007 article Use Client Service Intelligence to Get Proactive, I wrote about a relatively new category of IT management tool that measures the performance of end user computing assets (i.e, desktops and notebooks) from the end user’s perspective. Tools in this category help you understand how people use their computers (“working patterns”), and how well the computers perform their required tasks. Knowing this kind of information can help reduce your support costs, help you plan and execute migration cycles, and ultimately help increase end user productivity.

Now Forrester Research has just issued a report by senior analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani entitled The Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End User Experience Monitoring, Q3 2007. This report helps IT and operations professionals understand the market and make an informed decision on selecting an end user service management (EUSM) tool.

Forrester’s report identifies “end user experience” products from four independent software vendors that all fall into the “leader” category. The companies and their products are:

* Knoa Software -- Knoa Experience And Performance Manager
* PremiTech -- Performance Guard 5.0
* Serden Technologies -- Interact ES
* Symphoniq -- TrueView

According to Forrester, all four products behave in a similar fashion, and differ mostly in the reporting capabilities. All four products deploy a passive agent on the desktop to gather PC and application performance data and then send that data to a central database for collation and reporting. The reports tell you how the client computers in your organization are responding to their users’ needs.

When I talked with Garbani in May, he expected that the market for EUSM tools would really take off in the next few years. His reasoning is that IT applications have become very complex, with lots of moving parts. There’s now so much interaction among PC-based, server-based and Web-based applications that it’s hard to tell where the root of a problem is when a performance problem arises. An EUSM tool can help you see what is transpiring throughout a transaction, so you can pinpoint the problem.

Of course, the word “problem” is subject to definition. For instance, suppose an end user is using a desktop application and he attempts to perform a specific task. Say that task is saving his file. When he clicks on “Save file,” it takes his computer 15 seconds to perform the save, and his PC is hung-up until the save is complete. But the task does finish and the file gets saved.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.