Monitoring Web Application Performance from the User Perspective

Enterprises today depend heavily on web applications that provide critical business services to customers, partners, and employees. Their growing dependence on web technologies to achieve business innovation makes it essential to ensure that these applications provide a high-quality user experience.

Any performance degradation or service disruption can have serious business consequences.  As such, application support teams have to be fast on their feet in detecting, isolating, and resolving performance problems. That’s a tall order considering that each user transaction may involve the interoperation of multiple internal IT and/or partner resources — web servers, application servers, databases, and network components.

The solution lies in monitoring performance from the user perspective. By keeping tabs on how users are experiencing service delivery and identifying any delays or processing errors they are encountering, you can quickly spot problems. What’s more, you can gain richer insight into the causes of problems and, as a result, get to the root causes more quickly. 

This paper discusses the challenge associated with maintaining web application performance, business service level agreements (SLAs), and operating level agreements (OLAs). It examines the requirements that a solution must meet to address this challenge. It describes how Foglight solutions meet the requirements and presents real-world examples of these solutions in action.