User Experience: Monitor The Application Or The Network?

At a recent conference several application management software vendors debated user experience and application monitoring

. How do you measure end user experience? What is the best way to ensure that your end users are happy? What parts of your application are the most important to monitor to ensure the best end user experience?

Defining User Experience

First of all its important to define what end user experience is. End users dont experience the application as a whole they experience requests, like Log In or Purchase. When an end user calls to complain they dont say, The CPU utilization on one of your machines is too high. They say that they cant buy their flights to Hawaii.

Some people call these user requests Business Transactions, which simply means a user request. This may seem basic, but most organizations are unable to visualize their own applications in terms of these business transactions. With an IT application management like many organizations have, all you can see is the individual components of your application the servers, the databases, the network. You have no idea how your end user experiences these components.

Monitoring Business Transactions

So how do you monitor business transactions? There are several types of tools that are capable of understanding business transactions. Server monitoring tools arent, but both application and network monitoring tools are at a technical level able to understand BTs.

So how come so many tools dont?

To put it simply, they arent designed to. Most monitoring software is built to provide IT teams with an idea of 1) how their application performs as a whole (not individual transactions) or 2) how each server within their application performs by itself (only a piece of the business transaction). With tools like these most IT teams are not equipped to see what end users are complaining about.

So whats the difference between network monitoring and application monitoring? Simply put, application monitoring relies on agents, while network monitoring relies on sniffing network traffic passively. You can either monitor user experience with the network or you can manage it with the application. For example, with network monitoring you only see business transactions and the application infrastructure, because youre monitoring at the network layer. In contrast, with application monitoring you see business transactions, application infrastructure, and the application logic (hence the name application monitoring). Both are capable of seeing business transactions, but each is appropriate for different teams and different applications depending on how much visibility you need.

In short, the approach (network vs. application) is not as important as the specific technology. Sure, there are significant differences in the capabilities of the two approaches (one being that code-level detail is only available in APM, not NPM) but both tools should be able to give you the UX insight you need if you choose a tool thats built for business transactions.

by: joseph

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