Using WinTask to Extend ehealth Application Monitoring

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1 Using WinTask to Extend ehealth Application Monitoring WinTask is a task-automation tool that can record and play back user actions for any Windows-based application. It captures all the user activity associated with a task, such as keyboard entry and mouse clicks, and can replay the activity to reproduce the task automatically. This topic describes how WinTask can enhance the power of ehealth Application Response and Service Availability reports with continuous coverage for your critical business transactions. Monitoring application performance is essential for ensuring productivity and effectiveness within an organization. Reliable applications offer enhanced productivity for application users and for the IT staff who support those users. Monitoring application response and availability can help you avoid a potential deterioration in performance that could lead to decreased revenue and increased costs. It can also reduce the risks that accompany the rollout of new applications or upgrades of existing applications. Application Response provides information about true end-user experience. It monitors the response time and availability of critical applications, measures application response as experienced by end users, and performs active and historical analysis and reporting. It provides response data for client, network, and server time so that you can pinpoint the source of any problems or delays. Application Response provides data only when an end user is using an application. This is where Service Availability comes in. With Service Availability, you can obtain response and availability data for tests that run 24x7. This continuous, automated testing enables you to be less dependent on actual user activity so that you can address problems before they affect your users. Service Availability alone, however, tests services, such as HTTP and DNS. It does not test multistep, end-user transactions. WinTask provides the bridge between Service Availability and Application Response because it lets you access enduser data around the clock without requiring users to perform transactions. WinTask lets you record, edit, and save user transactions as tests. You can schedule a test to run continuously with either the WinTask Scheduler or Service Availability and monitor them using both Service Availability and Application Response. This approach provides continuous, consistent data for monitoring user transactions and services by simulating interactive user sessions. You can run tests at any time of day on the systems that you are monitoring without requiring actual user activity. This continuous data makes your ehealth reports more useful for capacity planning and long-term historical monitoring of the applications. Benefits With WinTask, Application Response, and Service Availability, you can do the following: Compare client, network, and server time for the exact same transaction to detect changes in service. Obtain continuous availability and response-time data for real user transactions. Identify degradations in transaction performance without requiring actual user activity. Test specific use cases and transactions before you widely deploy tasks to users. Test all transactions, including the rare ones that users may not perform frequently. Manage the scheduling and deployment of usertransaction tests from a centralized console. Compare Client, Network, and Server Time for the Exact Same Transaction. When you use WinTask to record and play back the same transaction again and again, you can monitor the client, network, and server time for each transaction to watch for changes in service. Because you are repeating and measuring the same transaction, the data you obtain should be identical for each occurrence of the transaction. Obtain Continuous Availability and Response Data for Real User Transactions. Service Availability provides response time and availability data for sample transactions for a variety of network services. It does not provide data for actual user tasks. When you use WinTask to create scripts that mimic user transactions

2 2 and then create Virtual User tests to run the scripts, Service Availability can provide continuous response time and availability data for those specific user transactions. Identify Degradations in Transaction Performance without Requiring Actual User Activity. With WinTask, you can run the same transactions continuously all day, every day. Coverage is no longer limited by the length of the work day. When you rely on actual user actions to bring problems to your attention, your first awareness that something is wrong may occur too late after a problem has affected users. Recording user actions in a WinTask script lets you automate those actions and test them any time. An AR agent can monitor the transactions, regardless of when you run the script, and alert you as soon as any problem begins. Test Specific Use Cases and Transactions before You Widely Deploy Them. You can use WinTask to record a new user transaction and test it before deploying it to real users. This can help you to test, measure, and evaluate the transaction before you roll out a new application or new Web site design on a wide basis. Test All Transactions Even Rare Use Cases. With Application Response, you can obtain data on transactions only when users perform them. Therefore, you may receive little or no data for transactions that users perform infrequently. For example, for a transaction performed only once a month means that you can only obtain data for that transaction once a month. Such infrequent monitoring may prevent you from noticing problems and trends for the transaction. If you use WinTask to create a script to execute that task more frequently, an AR agent could deliver continuous data for that transaction and provide better data on how the transaction is performing. Monitor User Transactions from a Centralized Console. When you use Service Availability and WinTask, you can deploy scripts from one central ehealth system. You can also schedule them to run and view data about them from that same central system. Example: Monitoring Web Server Service The corporate Web server provides customer self-service to download software and documentation. The company insists that customers have reliable access to this web service at any time of day or night. To ensure that reliability is both consistent and acceptable, it is important to take regular measurements of response and availability to have a broad sample. Collecting sample data for this type of transaction by performing test downloads at different times during the day and night is neither efficient nor cost effective. However, using Service Availability to create an HTTP test and a ping (ICMP echo) test to make sure that the server is responding 24x7 is considerably more efficient and cost effective. Service Availability also makes it possible to perform queries for getting real-time availability and response data. Response and availability data for HTTP and ping services may not be enough information to know that web services are performing consistently. You may want measurements for how long it takes to download a software package or a user guide. For end-user response data, you can create Application Response rules that monitor product downloads for each download transaction, whether that occurs from an automated test or from a live user. Again, automating test procedures like this is both more efficient and more accurate. Automation requires minimal employee time and the amount of information available from an AR agent provides accurate details more consistently. The following At-a-Glance reports provide a comparison of data that an AR agent is collecting based on real user transactions and data that an AR agent is collecting for a WinTask script that is simulating the same user transaction continuously. When you use WinTask with Application Response and Service Availability, you eliminate gaps in the data at times when users are not performing the transactions, which gives you a better view of how the transaction is performing all the time.

3 3 AR agent monitoring real user transactions AR agent monitoring a continuousl running WinTask script 3. Use Service Availability tests or the WinTask Scheduler to run the tests 24x7 from dedicated test systems. 4. Use Service Availability and Application Response to monitor response time and availability data for these continuous tests. 5. Run ehealth reports to view the response time and availability data. Run Reports. After you have been monitoring the WinTask scripts for several hours or days, you can run a Top N report to determine the average response, availability, and percentage of attempts that failed. The WinTask, Service Availability, and Application Response Solution. Here s how you can use WinTask with Service Availability and Application Response to create continuous, automated tests of end-user transactions: 1. Create WinTask scripts that access your software download page, download the files you want, and then close the Web browser. Create multiple scripts one for each package or each user guide you want to download. You do not need to test every package, but select a representative sample, downloading some very small files and other very large files. 2. Deploy your scripts throughout your enterprise so that you can run the same tests from multiple locations. This Top N report shows that the Bermuda system was unavailable for over 8% of the time over the report period, and attempts to contact the server were failing over 9% of the time. You can see that the other tests did not experience a similar availability problem. Assuming that those systems were running the WinTask scripts that were downloading different products from the same Web page, the difference in availability data indicates that the problem was with the specific test that was running from Bermuda, rather than with the Web server from which the products are being downloaded. If the server or the software download page had been unavailable, all of the tests would have reported availability problems. Drill Down For Details. To obtain more information about the lack of availability and the failed attempts on the Bermuda system, drill down from the Top N report to an At-a-Glance report for Bermuda. The following report indicates that the server was unavailable for two hours between 2:41 A.M. and 4:41 A.M. Perhaps an IT backup at this time deleted or corrupted the file that your test was downloading, and the test became successful again when

4 4 the file was restored. The consistent data before and after the time when the test was unavailable indicate that one event made the test unavailable at 2:41 A.M. and another event fixed the problem at 4:41 A.M. You can also see from the Avg. Response chart that the response time exceeded the response limit at several points during the report period. You can evaluate the response limit to determine if it is accurate for the type of test you are running. The occasional spikes in the response data do not indicate a problem, but they can indicate the worst response times that your users might experience. Organize Your Tests into Groups. You can organize your Virtual User tests in a variety of ways. For example, create groups that contain tests that are downloading different products from the same Web page. In addition, you can create groups that contain all tests for a particular application, and groups that test the same transaction from different locations. Use Live Health for Real-Time Notifications. After you have grouped your tests, associate the groups with Live Exceptions profiles so that you can receive real-time notifications of problems. Live Exceptions provides a number of default profiles with which you can associate your response groups and group lists. For example, you can associate the Response Delay, Response SLA, and Response Test Failure profiles with your groups. These profiles include rules that monitor variables such as average response time, average transaction time, service availability, failed attempts, and so on. You can set up automatic notifications so that whenever the variables in the profile exceed the thresholds you specified, Live Exceptions will alert you. You can view alarms in the Live Exceptions Browser. For example, the following Live Exceptions Browser shows that Bermuda sent Critical alarms at 2:41 A.M. to indicate that the service was unavailable and that the average response time was exceeding the response limit. Determine the Scope of the Problem. When Live Exceptions sends an alert, the on-call IT staff can check the Live Status diagram to understand the scope of the problem. The following Live Status diagram displays four groups: NYC, Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta. These

5 5 groups are all part of the Web Download group list. Each group is running the same four tests, downloading four different products (one in each test) from the software download page of the corporate Web site. Customizing Application Response. Application Response monitors many applications by default. You can also create custom rules by using the Business Transaction (BT) Studio toolkit. And, you can modify your WinTask scripts to include Windows events to enable Application Response to monitor Java and TN3270 applications. For More Information To learn more about WinTask, Service Availability, and Application Response, refer to the following resource: Using WinTask with Application Response and Service Availability guide WinTask Tutorial Online help from the ehealth Web interface ehealth Service Availability User Guide Online help from the WinTask interface NYC Atlanta Chicago Boston WebDownload The Live Status diagram shows alarms for one test in each group. The IT personnel can right-click on any icon to drill down from this diagram to obtain more information, including Trend reports, At-a-Glance reports, and Live Trend displays. This additional information can help with diagnosing the cause of the problem. Leverage SystemEDGE Features. Service Availability is an extension of the SystemEDGE agent. You can therefore use SystemEDGE features to enhance your use of Service Availability. For example, you can configure the SystemEDGE agent (by using the Configuration option on the Systems & Apps tab in the ehealth Web interface) to do any of the following: Send a trap to notify you immediately when a variable exceeds a threshold or a test fails. Perform an action (such as restarting a process, sending an , or paging an administrator) when it automatically detects the violation of a threshold or identifies a process or error message that you specified.

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