OpTier Experience Manager provides insight into how well application transactions perform for the end user.
OpTier introduces Experience Manager to help enterprise IT managers more quickly get to the root cause of application performance management problems impacting the end-user experience.
Poor application performance becomes more critical when an end user, potentially a customer, starts complaining about slow response times and lackluster results.
That’s why IT managers need to know about the issues impacting end-user experience over others, according to business transaction management vendor OpTier, which this week introduced software designed to track and troubleshoot application transactions with a focus on the end-user experience.
View OpTier’s Experience Manager in Network World’s Products of the Week slideshow
OpTier Experience Manager is an optional add-on to the company’s flagship product, CoreFirst. Experience Manager runs on a server and connects to the network via a span port or a tap. It passively monitors traffic for application response times and other metrics. The software watches traffic from end-user, or client, machines through the data center to identify when transaction response time, say, shifts from one second to five seconds. Such indicators could help IT fix an application problem before the end-user experience degrades, OpTier says.
“Experience Manager uses an end-to-end horizontal approach to immediately detect a performance degradation, without requiring IT administrators to correlate the data with other tools. If customers also have CoreFirst, then the software not only identifies the problem, but also lets IT managers drill down from the alert to learn the root cause of the problem,” says Russell Rothstein, vice president of marketing at OpTier.
The agentless software works continuously to detect service outages by collecting data from sources including the network, log files and page tags. The product also provides IT with some visibility into end-user behavior and interaction with applications. IT administrators can use Experience Manager to better understand trends of application and transaction usage by users, geographies and groups, the vendor says. Industry watchers say this level of end-user detail is what IT departments need to adequately manage application performance in advanced environments.
“Increasing operational complexity caused by virtualization, SOA and data rich media makes it difficult to isolate application performance problems and ensure quality end-user performance and productivity,” says Mary Johnston Turner, research director for enterprise systems management software at IDC, in an OpTier press release. “IT decision-makers consistently tell us that they need more sophisticated end-to-end application performance visibility and analysis to keep up with the demands of increasingly dynamic IT environments. By linking end-to-end transaction monitoring with end-user experience analysis, OpTier is directly targeting this emerging set of IT management requirements.”
Experience Manager is scheduled to be generally available by the end of October. The product can be purchased stand-alone, but OpTier has integrated the add-on application with CoreFirst. Pricing for Experience Manager starts at $40,000.
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