Security - We will get there

Infrastructure Monitoring

End User Experience Monitoring

BSM - Business Services Management

And here is some clips from the field:

Targeting the Right Metrics

When we talk about the end-user experience, what specific metrics do we really want to focus on?

“The best indication of how the application is performing for the end-user is to measure response times,” says Dr. Fulton of NetQoS. “The network, server and application components of response time are the most important metrics to monitor.”

Schofield of Dimension Data specifies that important end-user metrics include total transaction time, TCP set-up time, DNS look-up time, server processing time, time spent in a client PC/device, and time spent in the network.

For others, transaction times are not always the main focus. The bottom line is that a company must focus on the metrics that indicate user success, which can translate directly to customer satisfaction.

“Companies have been sold on the idea of customer experience online equating solely to speed of delivery, such as site response time, when in fact the performance of a website, from the consumer perspective, is made up of far more than just speeds and feeds,” said Galat from Tealeaf. “The same Harris Interactive survey I referred to earlier identified what really matters to the user—security, ability to complete a transaction, and receiving a confirmation upon purchase. Web page download speed was important to only 3% of the people surveyed.”

Targeting the right metrics depends on understanding your business and your customer’s needs. While there is no universal list of the right metrics to measure, information about the true user experience can enlighten companies about application performance in terms of their own customer’s requirements.

The Key to BSM

End-user experience metrics are part of the foundation of business service management. These metrics gauge whether the service is ultimately successful. Without the end-user experience, there is no context for understanding the performance of the underlying infrastructure, which means there is no way to accurately measure whether a device or application is performing below expectations. The end-user metrics define the expectations. Infrastructure monitoring is still necessary, but it must be combined with end-user monitoring to be truly effective. BSM is the correlation of user experience monitoring with infrastructure monitoring to deliver an end-to-end view of service health—a level of visibility that was never possible before.