software & applications
SMOOTH OPERATIONS
Experience is everything in applications – but are you monitoring it ?, asks Arun Balachandran , product analyst at ManageEngine .
Most successful , modern businesses rely on high performance business applications . IDC Research estimates there were nearly 156 billion mobile applications worldwide in 2015 , generating $ 34.2bn in direct ( non-advertising ) revenue ; the business application market alone is now said to be worth $ 1bn . Yet it is not just a question of numbers . Applications are now central to everything from customer engagement and payments in e-commerce , to predictive maintenance , accounting , and resource and supply chain planning across many industries .
The vital importance and ubiquity of applications makes monitoring user experience crucial . It is no longer enough to simply check that the application is up and running . We have to know how it is running and how well it is enabling the staff who rely on it to excel in their jobs . Does anyone want their customer relationship management applications to operate at a crawling pace , or their web checkout to fail after the customer has spent half an hour evaluating a purchase ?
Understanding the user experience , however , is complicated by the fact that the number of application users is growing all the time , particularly as more employees use mobile or wearable devices . Applications need to work consistently across all devices without lag or downtime ; ideally , they should never frustrate users with sessions that time out or screens that fail to refresh . Now that so many applications are accessed by a global audience , users should be able to quickly log-on wherever they are without performance issues .
Makeshift monitoring solutions
Unfortunately , there are plenty of organisations that still rely on homemade monitoring solutions – perhaps built on open-source software – to keep an eye on servers . While makeshift monitoring solutions can flag many issues , they still leave IT admins in the dark as to where the source of the problem lies unless they spend hours searching through log files .
Organisations with this kind of rudimentary monitoring leave themselves wide open to big losses of revenue when payment applications fail to work or staff cannot complete their tasks . These are unnecessary risks , especially when a variety of technologies now give IT admins the capability to test the user experience of applications . With the right monitoring tools , admins can identify performance issues , track down their source , and release fixes all within a matter of minutes .
The adaptability of these solutions means that they are suitable for the full range of applications a business is likely to use . Businesses that have just launched a new application , for example , might be concerned about monitoring when there is little to no user traffic in the application . Synthetic transaction monitoring technology simulates a typical user ’ s interaction with the application at regular time intervals and from different locations .
Synthetic transition monitoring
Synthetic transactions are critical for applications that are central to generating revenue , like a new e-commerce checkout . Should a problem emerge , IT operations can identify where the fault is occurring , halt testing and build a solution . The advantage of synthetic transaction monitoring is that it can be used when traffic is low , such as during weekends , or even before an application is launched .
However , if it is necessary to track every user step , or monitor an application that has to accommodate a high level of traffic , then real user experience monitoring is vital . Real user monitoring can measure response times in a browser , for example , to provide insight
18 | March 2017