ClientVantage Agentless What s New in Release 11.1

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1 ClientVantage Agentless What s New in Release 11.1 Release goals: Extend Vantage support for application and network monitoring. Content: Cisco NAM as the measurement data source for VAS... 1 End-User Experience monitoring in SAP R/3 environment... 3 User-Level Response Monitoring for Web Applications... 4 Currency and System Updates... 6 Enhancement Requests Addressed in This Release... 7 CISCO NAM AS THE MEASUREMENT DATA SOURCE FOR VAS Problem: Cisco NAM enables network devices to become collection points on application traffic that passes the Cisco devices. Data collected by NAMs include names of applications, traffic levels and basic network performance and response time measurements. Collection of such measurements is easy with Cisco devices already on the network, but Cisco NAM does not provide good reporting and analysis capabilities on the collected data. Only basic diagnostic reports are provided, separately for each NAM. Following ClientVantage Agentless11.1 features are now available for Cisco NAM users: Network Quality Assurance Assess business impact of poor network performance and manage application performance from a business perspective through Aggregate view of performance, availability and usage measurements Hierarchical view of network clients grouped by regions, areas and locations Analysis of link quality degradation (e.g. RTT or bandwidth) Real-time and historical reporting Business Impact Quantification Quantify the business impact of application problems to prioritize IT Operations effort through correlation of user activity with network and application performance: Individual user activity and location reporting Performance, availability and usage metrics by application and location Compuware ClientVantage Agentless11.0 October

2 Environment Right-Sizing using baseline reporting and trend analysis Manage growth of the TCP-based applications and drive efficient architecture decisions based on the business demand placed on applications and infrastructure. Deliver information that can be used to determine cost-savings opportunities; including server consolidation and network optimization Quality assurance for WAN-optimized applications Provide visibility into WAAS environments by reporting on application performance from the client, optimized link and data center perspectives. Report on the effectiveness of optimization with through a before and after view of performance and utilization End-user WAN Datacenter Multi-NAM, multi-source reporting platform VAS aggregates data from multiple NAMs, providing a single, consolidated view on all network application traffic and performance. Additionally, transaction-level measurements performed by AMD for selected applications can be extended with the broad landscape of network performance data from NAM. Benefit: Vantage Analysis Server is a perfect reporting and analytical platform for NAM data. VAS collects measurement data from multiple NAMs as if they were the Vantage probes and provides real-time reports, alerts and long-term data storage for baseline analysis and trending purposes. Data provides by NAMs is broader than NetFlow data - it contains network performance measurements and application response times. NAM data can be supplemented with AMD measurements in order to extend application performance analysis into transaction and user name context for critical applications on the network. Compuware ClientVantage Agentless11.0 October

3 END-USER EXPERIENCE MONITORING IN SAP R/3 ENVIRONMENT Problem: SAP application administrators have no clear visibility into performance of the application from end users perspective. Without this visibility there is no way to validate end-user complaints about application "slowness" and to validate whether performance tuning efforts bring desired effect - do they benefit end users? Existing SAP performance measurements using internal log data collection methods do not reflect the end-user experience, but rather the internal interactions of application components. Associated ClientVantage 11.1 features: SAP performance measurement instrumentation with no agents and excessive maintenance The SAP decode measures interactions of the SAP GUI clients with the SAP servers using the passive agentless network monitoring technology and network protocol analysis. No client or server instrumentation is required; all activity and user names are decoded from the traffic exchanged between clients and servers. Identify end-user performance issues by user and type of transaction user performed Users are identified by their login names, extracted from the network communication between clients and servers. Transaction names are identified on the basis of analyzing the dialog commands placed by the clients and transmitted to the server. Precise measurements of transaction times are being taken in context of specific, named transactions executed by the clients. Vantage automatically learns all transactions that end users execute and reports on all of them. Isolate faults within the SAP application infrastructure With the SAP decode, Vantage instruments all the SAP infrastructure end-to-end: SAP decode delivers end-user experience measurements for the SAP GUI clients HTTP decode measures end-user experience of the Netweaver users Database decodes measure performance of the relational database used by SAP servers Vantage Analyzer precisely measured performance of the Netweaver middleware Compuware ClientVantage Agentless11.0 October

4 Vantage service model ties all this data together into an end-to-end view that fuels dashboards and performance analysis reports Benefit: The end-to-end SAP infrastructure instrumentation enables Vantage to provide complete picture of SAP application end-user experience and support diagnostics of problems with the SAP application. Vantage provides answers to the questions on status of the SAP application: How many users use the application, specific application modules and specific transactions, and when How many users have performance problems with SAP, what are those performance problems, when they occur and what transactions cause performance problems How many users encounter errors working with SAP applications, what are those errors returned by the server and for what transactions What is causing the problems that end users experience: is it the SAP application server, the database server, the network delivering SAP application to end users What is causing slowness of particular transactions that are stuck on the application servers: application logic, system resources, database throughput etc. USER-LEVEL RESPONSE MONITORING FOR WEB APPLICATIONS Problem: Content delivered to end users by modern, complex Web applications is built by multiple tiers of the application infrastructure - a mesh of application servers, web services, messaging services and databases. These services often work independently, not knowing of each other operations. The only place where all this content is put together and becomes visible is the end-user's browser. Therefore in order to precisely measure end-user experience there is a need to deeply analyze content of pages returned to the user. Associated ClientVantage 11.1 features: Reporting on custom response messages Pages delivered by web applications to the clients contain various structured messages. Some of these are visible to the end-user, like messages informing on the status of the transaction, some are not visible and function as tags that are further used by the application client logic. CVA can be configured to analyze full content of the HTML response delivered by the server to the client in search for specific patterns that indicate such tags and messages, and pick up their content. VAS counts all occurrences when particular tag or pattern has been spotted in the response. AWDS builds a list of all values spotted in the response. This way CVA can report on all Compuware ClientVantage Agentless11.0 October

5 occurrences of particular pattern and AWDS extends that reporting by providing a complete list of all values that matched a pattern. The auto-learning algorithm picks up all messages that match a pattern and uses them as a dimension for reporting. There is no limitation on the number of auto-learned messages. Five different patterns can be set for auto-learning and these five patters form a canvas for five different dimensions of custom responses. This page returned 200 OK HTTP status, so there is no formal error, though the end user is informed by a custom message that processing of his request failed. CVA detects all occurrences of such errors returned to the end users and auto-learns all different kinds of messages that end-users see. CVA picks up all cases where "reservation by phone" is advised. For each of such cases CVA reports exact time when message has been returned, user name to whom it has been returned, transaction name which returned that message Extended reporting on application-level response errors One instance in which reporting on custom response messages extends current CVA capabilities is reporting on application errors signaled by messages presented to the user. CVA can autolearn all the error messages presented to the user, on the basis of pattern matching. Then, AWDS reports can be used to analyze frequency of particular application error occurrences, with details down to each individual error message as presented by a web application to the user. Custom transaction metrics on the basis of web application requests Custom metrics are calculated on the basis of parameter values extracted from HTTP or XML requests (for example, HTTP POST messages or SOAP RPC requests). The meaning of such custom metrics depends on particular monitored application. Its value could be, for example, the amount of a money transfer or the number of articles purchased in an online store. Each custom metric can be displayed as a sum of values or as their average. The sum metrics can be used to trace users that use the most or least resources (for example, clients who make the largest money transfers or order largest quantities of items from an online store). The average metrics can help in observing trends. Compuware ClientVantage Agentless11.0 October

6 Benefit: Some indications of the application state, like "soft" errors or warning messages, are visible to the user and can only be picked up if content of web pages returned to the user were analyzed in search for such errors. AMD performs such analysis and categorizes the messages returned by the web application, enabling Vantage to diagnose what end-user actions cause what responses or errors, and reporting precisely on messages that end-users have seen on their screens. Custom transaction metrics expand context of such response analysis with measurements taken on the basis of data requested by the end users. The metrics represent business context of the web application requests made by the end users. Aggregation of the custom metrics up to the application level carries this context further up the IT application stack and enables IT services management on the basis of dollar value importance of transactions executed through a particular service. CURRENCY AND SYSTEM UPDATES Update to VAS reporting on NV probe measurements Continue integration of the NV probe measurements with VAS reporting. VAS 11.1 addresses several aspects postponed in previous releases. VoIP measurement reporting NV probe has been modified to consistently report on VoIP statistics in every monitoring interval. This way VAS reports that use interval-based reporting paradigm show VoIP information in a way similar to any other VAS reports. HTTP host name reporting in VAS NV probe has been modified to report to VAS on HTTP host names detected from web traffic. Host names have been available only in Interactive Viewer, now VAS reports also show host names when VAS is connected to NV probes. QoS reporting in VAS NV probe has been modified to report to VAS on QoS tags in IP traffic. Now VAS reports show QoS (type of service) data in both cases when VAS reads measurements from AMDs and from NV probes. VLAN name reporting in VAS NV probe has been modified to report to VAS on VLANs through which it has seen the network traffic flows. VLANs are reported on the VAS's LinkView reports. HTTP decode: user recognition in Siteminder environment Problem: Siteminder changes session cookie constantly during the login sequence and during the session. HTTP decode didn't track changing cookie, so the user identification is lost immediately after the login sequence completed. Solution: HTTP decode track changing session identification cookie and follows the changes, so all user traffic is identified by user name detected at the login time. Oracle Forms decode: user name tracking between Oracle server sockets Problem: user logs on via HTTP to port 8025 and then uses Forms applet with the same server, but different socket 9025 and Forms over TCP, not HTTP. User name is not reported for Forms over TCP traffic. Solution: user name obtained from the HTTP traffic analysis is reported for Forms traffic of the same user to the same server. Duplicate packet resolution in presence of some network devices Problem: AMD may receive network packets from multiple network segments, for example from the front and the back of a firewall that does not terminate the TCP session. If such device uses the TCP sequence number randomization algorithm (ISN Randomization), AMD packet deduplication algorithm may not work. The results are bogus loss rate measurements returned by AMD and in some cases skewed transaction time measurements. Compuware ClientVantage Agentless11.0 October

7 Solution: AMD can be configured to use an alternate de-duplication algorithm that works better in presence of ISN Randomization. This alternate algorithm is optional in order to assure best precision of measurements when the prevailing cause of duplicate packets is different than randomized sequence numbers. Fixes to the Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability on VAS VAS reports have been modified to minimize the risk of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack, on the basis of recent security scans shared by our customers. The Vantage team performs continuous assessments of the VAS reporting console security and further updates should be expected with every new release. ENHANCEMENT REQUESTS ADDRESSED IN THIS RELEASE Eco MIB files should comply with SNMP v.2 VAS alerting Eco Need to increase the number of application errors levels (currently 5). HTTP analysis module Eco Unlimited number of HTTP Application Errors required. HTTP analysis module Eco Enhance MQ decode for M2M traffic to support MQ transactions MQ analysis module Eco QoS/TOS in zdata files produced by NV Probe VAS Network reports Eco HTTP host names in zdata files produced by NV Probe VAS Network reports Eco VoIP: make the end of call waiting time configurable (shorter by default) VAS/NV VoIP reports Eco VoIP: display MOS in every call interval VAS/NV VoIP reports Compuware ClientVantage Agentless11.0 October