* 10 considerations from research and analyst firm Trac Research
Through a recent survey, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Aberdeen Group said it found solid evidence that monitoring the end-user experience leads to a better overall application experience not only for users but also support staff. And to my way of thinking, anything that makes users happy and eases the help desk’s burden has to be a good investment.
But what makes for good end-user experience monitoring tool? For that I turn to a Trac Research report, published earlier this year, that highlights these 10 items to keep in mind as you evaluate end-user monitoring solutions.
1. Type of network used to access applications. Tools for evaluating the quality of the user experience for applications inside the corporate firewall should be able to correlate how network devices, servers and databases, for example, impact performance. On the other hand, a network of geographically dispersed monitoring points is required when users are accessing applications over the Internet.
2. Advanced analytics make performance data actionable. As end-user monitoring tools mature, IT ends up with an increasing depth and breadth of performance data. “Organizations having a good success in this area understand the importance of analytics that are being applied to this data as well as the importance of being able to customize their dashboards and ensure that specific jobs are only accessing information that is relevant for their areas of responsibility,” the researchers say.
3. Ease of integration with infrastructure monitoring products. An end-user monitoring tool’s effectiveness in identifying and solving performance problems improves the more seamlessly integrated it is with infrastructure monitoring tools. Better yet are tools that can combine this information with visibility into the end-user experience, Trac says.
4. Monitoring the end-user experience for each transaction. Collecting performance data in aggregate can provide a skewed view of what’s really happening. For truer views, IT should be able to monitor on a transaction-by-transaction basis.
5. Measuring the business impact. Ideally, IT should be able to translate application performance metrics into business metrics such as lost revenue opportunities, conversions and the the value of transactions failed, Trac says.
6. End-user experience monitoring goes beyond application speed and availability. Having visibility into usage patterns, application utilization and in-page metrics for business-critical applications helps IT determine an application’s usefulness and worth.
7. Instrumentation needed for end-user monitoring solutions to get up and running. Be aware that some tools require weeks or even months of instrumentation to get up and running while others need only a few hours to do so. The difference becomes especially important in IT shops doing a lot of application customization, Trac says.
8. The impact that end-user devices, browsers or operating systems have on the quality of the user experience. Not all tools are able to identify how different types of user devices, platforms, browsers or operating systems impact application performance, but IT shops with a lot of variety at this level might do well to seek them out.
9. Quality-of-performance thresholds. Automating the process of determining performance baselines helps IT keep up with changes in end-user behavior, reduce the amount of labor needed for managing application performance, decrease the number of false alerts and improve the overall usability of performance information, Trac says.10. The number of calls to the help desk is not a measure of the quality of the end-user experience. In other words, if your users are calling the help desk, your end-user experience monitoring tool isn’t doing its job
