End User Performance / Experience Monitoring

If your IT monitoring tools show that everything is green, but End User still complaining, then you have an IT monitoring “Visibility Gap.” It exists because you can’t measure the real end user experience.

Your Solution
SteelCentral Aternity’s user-centric approach to proactive IT management closes the IT monitoring Visibility Gap. It enables enterprises to detect performance issues by learning and analyzing user behavior in real-time, resolve performance problems faster, and attain the service levels demanded by the business.

Put the end user’s experience at the center of your monitoring strategy
SteelCentral Aternity transforms every device into a self-monitoring platform with an integrated view of the multiple streams of data that together provide a comprehensive portrait of real end user experience. Dynamically monitors any user interaction within any application running on any type of physical, virtual or mobile device, with no programming required.

Extends across the broadest range of application technologies, including thick client, web-based, Rich Internet, Java, .NET, Android and iOS applications.

Correlate three streams of data for true End User Experience Monitoring
Unlike APM products that monitor specific applications from the perspective of the data center, or device monitoring products that measure device, operating system, and app health, SteelCentral Aternity automatically monitors and correlates together the three streams of data that constitute true user experience – user interactions, device health and performance, and application performance, as seen by the end user. 

Automatic discovery of key metrics for End User Experience Management
With SteelCentral Aternity, there’s no manual configuration required to discover the three streams of data that impact real end user experience. 

• Users and their locations: Automatic discovery of user attributes such as identity, role, department, office and geographic location, subnet, and VPN, enable you to immediately analyze the impact of performance on workforce productivity.
• Devices and their Operating Systems: Automatic discovery of key attributes of every physical, virtual, or mobile device, including make & model, number of cores, disks and shared drives, OS type, version & service pack, boot services, running processes, and the top processes consuming CPU, memory, and I/O resources. With this data, you can assess how performance is affected by device configurations.
• Applications, processes, and health indicators: Automatic discovery of all local, cloud, web, or instrumented mobile app running on any physical, virtual, or mobile device. Discovering applications actually in use, whether authorized by IT or not, enables you to combat Shadow IT. 

Built-in analysis of the impact of IT on user productivity
SteelCentral Aternity provides you with immediate insight into how application performance affects productivity:

• Instantaneously assess how long users wait for business critical applications to respond, by analyzing application usage, time spent running in the foreground, active time, wait time, and crashes.
• Identify trends and impacts of lost productivity across the enterprise by analyzing frequent waiting periods.
• Dramatically improve ROI by identifying unused or over-licensed software, and aligning license expenditures to actual usage.

Define business activities on your terms
Applications used by your workforce may be part of a single step, or part of a more complex user workflow, consisting of a sequence of business activities. Unlike APM products that primarily report application diagnostic data like SQL and code level execution times, URL response and page load times, or HTTP and TCP errors, SteelCentral Aternity enables you to define user interactions with applications in the context of a business workflow, to track the impact of IT performance on workforce productivity.

Create signatures that represent business activities
Any user interaction or network event can be used to create a “signature” that defines a business activity. Signatures define the start and end events that the business wants to measure, and can represent a single interaction or a multi-step business process. Neither application development skills nor SteelCentral Aternity engineering skills are needed to create signatures. They are configured from the SteelCentral Aternity console, and can be changed on the fly without redeploying the application.

Proactive problem identification and resolution
For every application, device and user performance metric collected, SteelCentral Aternity automatically generates a baseline. Baselines can automatically be split, by location, subnet or target server, etc., so that a granular baseline exists for every group of users sharing the same experience for the same transaction or business process. Manual thresholds can be set to complement the automatically generated baselines.

As soon as performance deviates from the baselines or manually set thresholds, SteelCentral Aternity automatically detects the problem, generates alerts and opens trouble tickets. It helps speed resolution time by automatically analyzing the business impact and affected groups, and identifying the probable cause.

Built-in analytics speed time to value
Aternity provides additional built-in analytics that enable you to rapidly assess application performance and health, device performance and reliability, and the impact of IT on user experience.

• Instant view of application performance through a color-coded Apdex score and through a User Experience Index that accounts for application wait time, crashes, hangs, and errors
• Key measures of service levels and adoption of applications across the enterprise
• Automatic detection of incidents and initiation of alerts to 3rd party systems such as Service Desk and Manager of Managers