You Only Need Real or Synthetic User Monitoring

Depending on the situation, several end-user monitoring technologies are required to communicate the relevant information to the right people at the right time with critical information that contributes significantly to the overall success of the business. Using all three categories of end-user monitoring technologies—synthetic monitors, real user monitors and business transaction monitors—captures the customer experience across complex transactions and provides the information needed to accelerate problem isolation and resolution.

As time goes on and more services are added, maintaining a manual map becomes increasingly difficult to the point at which it is impossible to maintain reliable models due to the number of changes and intricate dependencies. By leveraging technology that automates discovery and dependency mapping, companies can lower costs while reducing mean time to resolution and increasing mean time between failures.

Many enterprises have opted for software as a service (SaaS) delivery for a variety of reasons, including lower total cost of ownership, faster implementation time and the ability to deliver insight without the need for end users or even administrators to become application-monitoring experts. An outsourced monitoring strategy offers the ability to validate the performance of applications outside its firewalls from multiple locations around the world.

Many organizations have found after years of effort that it is impossible to build one Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to serve all requirements. No single CMDB can do everything you need, which is why CMDB federation is critical in order to share information with other data repositories.

With enterprise monitoring software becoming increasingly tied to other strategies within the organization, IT organizations must, therefore, have the ability to monitor, diagnose and resolve critical problems across the entire application lifecycle.

Second or sub-second monitoring will uncover events that are temporary or transitional and not necessarily good indicators of performance problems that truly impact end-user experience. To ensure that the right level of information is captured, all organizations need to have a systems-monitoring system that works with or without automated agents.

Instead of monitoring every possible metric, IT administrators should look for monitoring systems with built-in expertise regarding the most important metrics to watch.

Discovery and dependency relationship mapping technology can help IT in monitoring the systems, applications and application components that matter. Once you understand what is critical to service delivery, you can construct measurable and enforceable service-level agreements (SLAs) between teams and partners to facilitate end-to-end service availability and performance.

In order to thoroughly understand application health, detailed component monitoring, diagnostics and dynamic configuration modeling are required to understand the complex interactions between the various services.

System monitoring alone, while still critical, will not provide an accurate or complete picture of true application performance. True end-user-focused monitoring is critical and is an essential piece of today’s monitoring strategy.