Next Generation End User Experience Management:

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Joel Bryan
6 years ago
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Network Performance Insight An AppNeta White Paper

1 Next Generation End User Experience Management: Application Performance Management with Deep Network Performance Insight An AppNeta White Paper

2 End User Experience Matters to Your Business In an era of new technologies and cloud-based application delivery models, your business success depends on your ability to ensure optimal application performance and quality user experiences at all times. And end users expectations are high when it comes to performance; speed matters, and every second counts. In fact, for website applications, a one second delay in response time can reduce conversions by 7%, page views by 11% and customer satisfaction by 16%. >>> Ensuring quality application experiences for your internal customers -- employees and partners -- is also critical for your organization s bottom line. Slow internal applications severely hinder employee productivity, bringing your business to a stop and putting a strain on IT, application support and web development teams. They can t afford to spend valuable time and resources chasing down the root cause of a slow application. For example, when considering website performance at peak traffic times, more than 75% of online customers will leave for a competitor s site rather than suffer delays. So, instead of driving more revenue for your organization, you could end up benefiting your competitors if your web application is too slow. And not only that, your brand can be severely damaged; according to Boston Consulting Group, many consumers who become frustrated with an online site blame the website organization, not the Internet. A Network World study puts web application downtime costs at approximately $72,000 per hour. <<< The New End User Tolerance Threshold? 2 Seconds! Today, end user satisfaction is everything: your application must perform or your customers will either flock to your competition or will saturate your internal IT helpdesk systems with open issues requests. The magic end user tolerance thresholds used to be four seconds. Not a second more. Today, the average online shopper expects your web pages to load in two seconds or less; after three seconds, up to 40% will abandon your site. And remember, repeat customers spend 67% more and are more profitable for your business, so you want to keep them on your site. But it s not only e-retailers who should be concerned about web performance optimization. Web performance is critical across all enterprise organizations, regardless of what vertical you are in. Think about it -- after or instant messaging, the second most popular online activity is searching for product or service information. Therefore, your website is a key source of leads and prospects looking for more information about your organization, products and services. If your website doesn t perform sufficiently, prospects will turn to your competitors, costing you potential new and ongoing revenue. Likewise, expectations among your internal users have increased dramatically. When mission-critical applications (i.e. corporate , Salesforce or EHR applications) slow down, or worse yet stop working altogether, the phone calls start immediately and productivity stops. Complaints from your VP of Sales, your Operations Director and other key stakeholders in your organization will definitely get your manager, and upper management s attention; this attention will not be good news for you. Consequently, achieving quality web experiences and optimal web performance should be a major business goal for any organization.

The Challenge: A New Cloud-Based Application Stack Nowadays, web application content delivered to your customers and internal users traverses a complex path of interrelated entities inside and

3 The Challenge: A New Cloud-Based Application Stack Nowadays, web application content delivered to your customers and internal users traverses a complex path of interrelated entities inside and outside your control zone datacenters, private and public clouds, remote sites and locations, 3rd party services and components -- any of which are potential bottlenecks or failure points. Not only is every element of the chain responsible for presenting content to the end user, but common and frequent problems can occur in: the source code of an application a specific method s call to a back-end database a 3rd party hosted application or service a saturated network a datacenter-to-datacenter connection an oversubscribed WAN link That is a lot of elements to understand and manage for top performance. Any type of problem within this new cloud-based application stack, regardless of where they happen, will negatively impact user experiences. The cause/effect relationship between poor network performance and a negative impact on application performance and user experience is well understood: a poor-performing network means slower applications, poor user experiences and customer complaints. But there are many other types of end user behavior and traffic that add to this cause/effect relationship that are not taken into consideration as frequently: Employee recreational Internet traffic (i.e. Youtube.com, Facebook.com, itunes, etc.) puts a strain on your network and impacts mission-critical application performance. You may not have enough network capacity to handle new voice/video application load. Business growth, while clearly a positive trend, can be risky business if you haven t done your planning homework and properly assessed your network s ability to support new application traffic demands prior to a major launch. Bi-directional Cloud IP traffic (from your datacenter to the Internet) worsens an oversubscribed WAN link bottleneck. Traditionally, application management has been characterized by a horizontal approach, in the sense that a domain management group was responsible for individually maintaining each silo. (i.e. DBAs were responsible for maintaining databases; development/application support teams were monitoring their applications; network administrators were overseeing network capacity and performance, etc.) However, the relationship between network and application performance is so important that without a cohesive and integrated management strategy in place, your IT, development and operations teams will be troubleshooting in the dark, severely impacting MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Resolution). This translates into poor user experiences and the inability to meet your business goals. Moreover, in this type of scenario, performance optimization initiatives a key necessity to provide faster responses than your competitors sites - are almost impossible.

The Answer: A New Approach to Performance Management The only way to ensure optimal performance in today s world is by focusing on end user experience monitoring that offers a unified understanding

You need to holistically manage performance end-to-end, starting from your users, and covering the entire cloud-based application stack -- network performance, cross-datacenter and remote site

Let s review this strategy in more detail: 1: End User Experience The reality is that whether an application is fast or not depends on your end user s perception.

4 The Answer: A New Approach to Performance Management The only way to ensure optimal performance in today s world is by focusing on end user experience monitoring that offers a unified understanding of both Application Performance Management and deep Network Performance Insight. You need to holistically manage performance end-to-end, starting from your users, and covering the entire cloud-based application stack -- network performance, cross-datacenter and remote site connectivity, 3rd party SLAs and application traffic, down to network packets and application code -- to quickly identify the root cause of any type of problem impacting your end users. Let s review this strategy in more detail: 1: End User Experience The reality is that whether an application is fast or not depends on your end user s perception. Consequently, achieving business objectives requires a clear view into your end users Web application experience. Vendors have been addressing transaction management from two different perspectives: real time versus synthetic monitoring. The reasoning behind these two approaches is that real-time monitoring can help you quickly detect and pinpoint application problems to an offending JavaBean method, servlet or database connection in real time as soon as they happen, while synthetic monitoring proactively exercises applications to help identify and repair application crashes or wrong return data before real end users encounter those situations. An ideal management solution should deliver both approaches. In fact, you should start by identifying your real business objectives or scenarios (i.e., my goal is to get users to register for a seminar, to retrieve an EHR record, to look up Salesforce contact information or to sell an item) to identify which Web transactions are critical in your environment. Each one of these critical business scenarios or transactions should be managed synthetically and in real time, both on a continual basis.

5 2: Network Performance Networks don t always work the way you expect or the way they were designed. Unfortunately, network performance problems will significantly impact the quality of your business application deployments (i.e. VoIP, video conferencing, VDI, websites, etc.). Key network performance indicators that you should have deep insight into and monitor 24/7 across all network paths that deliver your key applications and services include: capacity utilization data loss jitter route analysis Quality of Service (QoS) configuration You should also monitor site-to-site connectivity, connectivity with remote locations and 3rd party services providers SLAs. Besides on-going network performance monitoring, pre and post-assessments of the network should be a key focus of your integrated performance management plan as well. For example, every time that you are planning changes in your environment (i.e. private or public clouds initiatives, new application rollouts, new marketing campaigns driving additional online visitors to your website, network or application performance optimization initiatives. etc.), you should plan a thorough network assessment to baseline the overall health of your network and to ensure that you have enough capacity to handle additional demands. Otherwise you will be exposing your organization to risk. Similarly, thorough network assessment can also tremendously help when you are running into intermittent performance issues that you can t reproduce or troubleshoot, or when an increased number of helpdesk issues are reported and opened because of a slow network. >>> Network assessment and continuous performance monitoring are critical components of key application-centric initiatives, such as new application deployment, upgrades and application performance optimization initiatives. <<< In addition, every application comes with bandwidth requirements. If you are considering implementing or expanding a current application, it is necessary to know the requirements and behavior of the other applications that are already dependent on your network. The best way to understand exactly how your bandwidth and capacity are utilized and by whom users, applications and protocols is to go deeper into your network flows. Is actual utilization nearing total capacity at any sites with existing business-normal behavior? Are LAN and WAN elements and the applications using them behaving properly at peak traffic utilization levels? Is recreational Internet traffic from your employees putting a strain on your network and impacting critical apps performance? Network traffic monitoring capabilities will give you the insight you need to ensure proper bandwidth allocation across your applications, readjust your QoS and network policies as needed and assure optimal application performance. In addition, look for remote network packet capture capacities to decrease MTTR and simplify deep forensics analysis at remote locations. 3: Synthetic End User Monitoring One of the best ways to ensure quality customer experiences is to detect problems before your end users are even aware that there is a problem. Proactively monitoring your web applications using the same network circuits to and from the same remote sites and locations that your end users do is the best way to accurately assess the application performance as experienced by your customers and find problems before they do. You should put a plan in place to proactively monitor your most critical web transactions on a 24x7 basis (i.e. shopping carts, CRM record retrieval, etc.) In addition to overseeing end-to-end transaction response time, pay attention to the performance of each object within each page to ensure that images, videos or 3rd party objects embedded in your web apps (i.e. Google Analytics, Marketo, Facebook or Twitter feeds, etc.) are not slowing down your site and negatively impacting user experience. VoIP, Video and Unified Communications are also critical applications for your organization employee productivity and business operations depend on them so proactive monitoring of VoIP/video should also be part of your integrated IT performance management plan. Look for key monitoring capabilities such as the ability to evaluate production networks using real VoIP telephony packets without the deployment of any additional VoIP equipment, or capabilities to test, verify and monitor the quality of a video conference before it actually takes place. With the right solution in place, you can decrease support costs and ensure optimal VoIP/ video performance and quality user experiences on an on-going basis.

4: Application Tracing Your application performance management strategy must include capabilities to continuously monitor and optimize end user transactions in real-time, view performance data across

6 4: Application Tracing Your application performance management strategy must include capabilities to continuously monitor and optimize end user transactions in real-time, view performance data across layers and hosts and go deeper into your application code to identify the root-cause of an application performance bottleneck, application crashes or errors. With real-time application tracing, you can visualize the latency of any request in your application and get insight into what is causing a latency problem whether it is a failing SQL query, an overloaded server or a poorly performing method. Look for low overhead, multi-language support, comprehensive alerting mechanisms and advanced filtering capabilities so your development counterparts can review their trouble points and the issues that only affect a portion of your end user. This is a key component to a unified performance management strategy and offers the level of insight development teams need to quickly identify where problems are occurring and to go deeper into the application code. Introducing AppNeta Unified Performance Management AppNeta offers unified IT performance management solutions across private/public clouds, datacenter and remote sites to uniquely arm IT ops, apps ops and development and business teams with capabilities to continuously assess, monitor, troubleshoot and report on mission-critical application service delivery from your end user s perspective. AppNeta offers innovative end user experience monitoring with the following integrated approaches for application and network performance management, enabling you to: Identify network capacity issues, network latency, data jitter or data loss impacting user experience any where inside your datacenter, datacenter to datacenter, or datacenter to the cloud with PathView. This is the best way to find the root cause of a network performance problem, simplify troubleshooting tasks and decrease MTTR. Understand exactly how your bandwidth and capacity are utilized and by whom users, applications and protocols with FlowView. With this actionable intelligence, you can adjust your configuration and policies to ensure enough bandwidth to handle new applications and additional demand placed in your network and to properly redefine QoS settings and corporate network usage policies as needed. Understand Proactively monitor your production mission-critical applications on a 24x7 basis, using the same network circuits and from the same remote sites and locations that your end users do with AppView Web. This is the best way to find web performance problems before your users are impacted. Understand Go deeper into your application code with visibility across all layers of the application with TraceView. TraceView allows you to immediately identify the root cause of a problem down to a slow SQL query, a poorly performing method or an over-utilized server in your datacenter and more with TraceView.

The Keys to Monitoring Internal Web Applications

WHITEPAPER The Keys to Monitoring Internal Web Applications Much of the focus on applications today revolves around SaaS apps delivered from the cloud. However, many large enterprises are also required