Many IT departments have invested in implementing management systems to monitor availability of their IT infrastructure and applications, as well as in some cases, solutions to monitor server and network performance.
These are not wasted investments, but many still find the performance and availability that the end-user or customer complains about experiencing is not being picked up by these management systems, which makes it very difficult to fix and improve.
The good news is that there are solutions in the market that can provide organisations with visibility of the quality of experience from an end-user perspective.
Pre-production
First, we advise that companies should look at load-testing new or changed applications before they are put into production for business and customers to use.
The concept is to test the application performance by loading it with the anticipated amount of concurrent users doing transactions. HP LoadRunner is a market leader in this space, and we would highly recommend it. Many companies in SA make use of HP LoadRunner.
Production
In production, many factors can affect the performance that customers and end-users experience.
A solution therefore needs to help identify where the problem could be along the transaction path.
We have found two approaches to the solution, using HP Application Performance Monitoring products:
* One is to monitor the application transactions in the network in real-time. The upside of this is that all transactions and all users can be monitored. The downside is that this can be a lot of data to manage.
* The other is to use selected synthetic transactions with virtual users from selected locations. This, we have found, is the most common and preferred approach, as it allows for a lot more control, and can be done outside of normal hours as well.
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