The relation between IT and the business has changed. Today your success is measured on the value you deliver to your organization, and how well you service the end-users you support. Unfortunately your job has never been so challenging. You are responsible for hundreds of legacy, packaged and custom applications deployed across datacenters and cloud locations, remote sites and branches, each one with a distinctive underlying technology, a different purpose, and a unique set of users, requirements and problem-points.
Traditional infrastructure-centric application performance monitoring (APM) solutions give you valuable insight into key server performance metrics (e.g. CPU usage, disk, memory, processor queue length…), but they are no longer enough to assure optimal user experiences and customer satisfaction. In fact, you will be operating in the dark when it comes to key performance metrics that are crucial to your users: application availability and response time.
Did you know that the IT department is unaware of 75% of all application problems until they are escalated from the help desk (Source: Forrester)?
Here are some samples of common problems that you will miss with a traditional infrastructure-centric monitoring approach.
- An application is not available. Just see below some sample screenshots of the errors your users could encounter when interacting with your applications. These are “hidden” problems for infrastructure-centric APM solutions.
- Slow response time. For example a key business operation process such as “open a lead record” (critical for your sales operations) is starting to degrade and slows-down. Unless you continuously monitor and validate key transactions as users do (e.g. logging, open sales record, add new customer log activity, logout), you will never know that there is a problem until the first complaint arrives at your helpdesk.
- Geographical response time discrepancies across users. For example, remote office employees are seeing time out errors when accessing a terminal-based application or an HR application is slow for users logging in from outside headquarters. There are all situations only visible when monitoring and comparing application response time across locations.
- SLA violations and problematic trends. Without user-centric monitoring in place you will not be able to baseline application performance, let alone track, measure and validate your SLAs over time. For example a key EHR transaction, add a new patient record or access a patient record, is not meeting SLAs. This type of problem is only visible when you are monitoring your applications from an end-user perspective.
- End-user requests fail to complete. For example, an overloaded CRM application times out, or a Citrix server is unable to process user requests. These types of problems are also invisible when your monitoring strategy is centered on the underlying infrastructure.
Instead, when you rely on Application Performance Monitoring solutions centered on User Experience you gain:
- Complete end-to-end transaction visibility, from the moment an end-user clicks until the transaction is completed
- Proactive problem identification much earlier, before large volumes of users are already impacted
- A unified view across IT and business metrics
This is why 81% of organizations are exploring a user-centric approach for managing IT (Source: TRAC Research).
Join the ranks and learn more about Tevron’s CitraTest APM: one end-user centric monitoring solution for ALL your applications. 100% non-intrusive monitoring that will not impact your production applications or change your application code. By automating the driving of ANY application — just like a real user would do — visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, driving the keyboard and mouse and taking response time measurements along the way, CitraTest APM ensures that all critical aspects of an application or service are available and working effectively for your users, instantly alerting you at the first sign of trouble. Plus all the information you need to troubleshoot, analyze or report is available via an intuitive role-based web console, accessible anytime, anywhere.
Good luck with your monitoring!