End-user experience monitoring (EUXM) provides an early warning system that a business-critical services from the end-user perspective is running slow or not responding correctly.

EUXM alerts IT operations staff about the measured performance degradation before it crosses the frustration threshold and employees or customers start to call your help-desk. It gives you a significant advantage of solving problems before they take notice about them, thereby yielding a higher service quality and lower TCO.

Objective view of user experience

Monitoring the end-user experience with synthetic user transactions – also known as active testing – gives you the most objective picture from a customer-side perspective. Instead of deducing the status of your business-critical application from measurements in the application, database or infrastructure layer which can be very complex and fragile to changes, it employs a black-box view that hides this complexity and focuses on response-time and transaction execution correctness. Coupled with measurements from other layers it is a unique tool for E2E diagnostics during the troubleshooting process.

PVSR supports two ways of EUXM, the one that is applicable in a given environment depends on the client of the monitored system:

Monitoring apps with thin-clients

PVSR provides capabilities for monitoring web based clients and business-to-business web (SOAP) services through scripted HTTP request/response measurement sequences. A browser plug-in is available for recording the interaction with the business application to make scripting easier. The recorded and edited script can be upload into PVSR to start the periodic measurement.

Monitoring apps with thick-clients

PVSR provides capabilities for monitoring desktop client applications or sophisticated web front-ends through a robotic agent. The EUXM robot replays user interactions on the application running on the same desktop (in most cases running on a virtual machine). It works by issuing simulated user transactions to your application in order to mimic what a typical customer might do. It can be issued from a single designated robot client or from multiple robot clients at different server locations to better gauge service availability and responsiveness especially through WAN links. The robot is development platform antagonistic – works with application written in Java, .NET, C++, Flash, etc. – and can be deploy on Windows XP/7/8. To view a demo of such a test click here.

Instant benefits:

• Use EUXM as the basis for transparent and objective service-level agreements (SLA) reports.
• Proactively identify errors affecting employees or customers before they call the help-desk.
• Enforce SLAs to meet agreed service quality.
• Automatically trend and baseline normal performance.
• Establish clear application performance measures before and after introducing a new release.