|
SPECIAL FOCUS:
From the September 2006 |
Monitor application performance by Fred Dumoulin An effective monitoring strategy should zero in on Web performance problems from three directions: the user application experience, device availability and site availability. A three-pronged performance-monitoring strategy can improve problem identification and resolution. This comprehensive, multipronged approach enables IT managers to streamline error detection and resolution, while ensuring that most errors are fixed well before users are impacted. Of particular interest is a new class of Web-monitoring technology called real-user monitoring (RUM). RUM’s real-time view of each user’s experience enables IT organizations to quickly point to causes of errors and to find or fix even transient brownouts by correlating seemingly unrelated error patterns. RUM is important on three key levels. First, it lets operations teams find and isolate problems instantly, reducing mean time to repair and fixing problems before the phone rings. Second, it lets engineering teams track the effects of changes to content, applications, networks and infrastructure, reducing risk and providing change-management accountability. Third, it enables line-of-business and marketing teams to monitor customer quality of service, optimizing performance and availability while resolving service disputes and protecting revenue/renewals. Site availability is best assessed by invoking synthetic testing solutions from various locations worldwide. Some organizations improperly extend this to include assessing service levels and user satisfaction of individual transactions, which likely will be ineffective in the case of brownouts and transient errors, which are often related to the state of a real user’s session, the timing of the request, navigation, the user’s browser or the resource selected by a load balancer, and occur only intermittently to a small percentage of users. Monitoring the user application experience requires seeing and tracking pertinent details of every transaction, every page, every object and every problem encountered by each user, every day. RUM tools cull through and drill down deeply into this session-level data on a point-and-click basis to quickly and accurately assess performance levels, correlate common errors and isolate root causes of problems. By logging and time-stamping all pertinent transactions and error conditions in every user’s session, RUM identifies problems and isolates their source. Web-management personnel can then drill down through the session to uncover root causes. The best RUM systems detect early warning signs and evaluate overall performance against a service-level agreement (SLA). These and other capabilities improve production networks and the entire application life cycle, including development and deployment testing. Today’s RUM tools also integrate with complementary monitoring and diagnostic tools for a more detailed, accurate and comprehensive view of Web site health and performance. They include application programming interfaces and other hooks to third-party tools and infrastructure. This enables RUM summary or individual user activity transcripts to be transported to data warehouses, for instance, or for RUM output to be streamed to business or operations dashboards in real time, extracted for archival purposes, or loaded into third-party or custom reporting tools or enterprise-wide data buses. Fred Dumoulin is a project manager for Coradiant, Poway, Calif.
For more information: |