by Don Jones

Large enterprises have been trying to monitor and manage applications since the mid-1990s, but the first generation of application performance technology (e.g., BMC’s early versions of Patrol and Compuware’s EcoTools) treated applications as just another set of components of the IT infrastructure. Thresholds were set in advance by vendor or user, signifying levels of local element resource consumption or latency measures that were considered impermissible to cross, and polling agents were periodically put in place to determine whether those thresholds were close to getting crossed or, worse, had been crossed since the last time the local element was checked. As long as application code was monolithic, centralized and static, and clear boundaries separated one application from the next, such an approach seemed effective. Not too many agents were required and not too many thresholds needed to be examined to infer the end-to-end state of a given application.

In a world of highly modular, highly distributed, volatile and fuzzy-edged applications, the number of agents that would be required to deliver a holistic view of application performance would likely cripple the performance of the applications being monitored. Furthermore, the interactions among the various modules of modern applications have become so complex and multidimensional that it is likely that valid inferences from local to global application states would be almost impossible to carry out with any regularity.

- Will Cappelli, Gartner Group Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring

Gartner proposes that a five-dimensional approach to application performance monitoring is necessary – and they propose that the first of those dimensions is end user experience, or EUE, monitoring.

Why? Too often, we in IT are focused on… well, on the technology. We measure processor utilization. We measure memory utilization. We check network latency. We track database query execution time. But you know what? None of that matters. Those measurements all “live” in the data center, and ultimately they only matter to people in the data center. The business doesn’t care about how fast the database is: The business cares about what customers see. What their salespeople see. What productive user see. In other words, businesses care about the EUE.

The idea is that we need to stop worrying first about what’s happening in the data center, and instead start managing service level agreements (SLAs) that focus on what the end user is experiencing. If the EUE times start to go bad, then we dive into the data center to find out why – and that dive is what the other four dimensions of Gartner’s model are all about.

The EUE becomes our goal, our metric for success. If the EUE is within acceptable boundaries, then what’s happening in the data center doesn’t really matter. When the EUE starts to look bad, then the data center-centric numbers can help us figure out why. We stop building SLAs around things like database response times, and instead use our knowledge of database performance to develop thresholds that can help us troubleshoot things when the EUE isn’t where we need it to be.

By moving our application performance perspective out of the data center, and into the end user’s experience, we can start managing what the business cares about, rather than what IT cares about.

About the Author

Don Jones has more than a decade of professional experience in the IT industry. He's the author of more than 30 IT books, including Windows PowerShell: TFM; VBScript, WMI, and ADSI Unleashed; Managing Windows with VBScript and WMI; and many more. He's a top-rated and in-demand speaker at conferences such as Microsoft TechEd and TechMentor, and writes the monthly Windows PowerShell column for Microsoft TechNet Magazine. Don is a multiple-year recipient of Microsoft's "Most Valuable Professional" (MVP) Award with a specialization in Windows PowerShell. Don's broad IT experience includes work in the financial, telecommunications, software, manufacturing, consulting, training, and retail industries and he's one of the rare IT professionals who can not only "cross the line" between administration and software development, but also between IT workers and IT management. Don is a co-founder of Concentrated Technologies, and serves as author and series editor for Realtime Publishers.