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End-to-end monitoring – Measuring what the user perceives

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Article from ADMIN 40/2017

By Jürgen Vigna

Continuously monitoring the performance of applications helps ensure the service quality in multilayered cloud services.

Users continually complain that everything runs slow, but is it true? If so, why? End-to-end monitoring solutions like Alyvix [1], the monitoring tool I look at in this article, measure the performance and availability of business-critical applications from the user's point of view. Quality checks thus take place when the program is running in production mode. The objective is to ensure not only that users are satisfied, but that the admin can detect potential problems in advance on the basis of performance data.

This method also assumes that monitoring individual components of an IT service does not provide meaningful results. Databases, web servers, or hosts might work fine in and of themselves, but the application that builds on them still might be unusable because the individual parts do not interact smoothly. In this case, admins can detect performance hits by measuring the time required for actions that users would normally carry out. Admins thus measure certain data (e.g., responsiveness or failed interactions) that represents the user experience.

End-to-end monitoring [2] distinguishes between two techniques: Active (synthetic) monitoring versus passive (user) monitoring. Active monitoring tools simulate typical user behavior and record performance data. Passive monitoring tools save the performance data while the user is performing the various tasks. The benefit of the active approach is that it draws your attention to sources of interference before they affect the system. In principle, though, both approaches provide meaningful data.

Performance problems prolong individual processes, reduce staff efficiency, and cause frustration. If the end user is a customer, the negative effects are usually greater and, in the worst case, can end in termination of an agreement, so end-to-end monitoring is an important component in

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