Optimizing The End-User Experience Across Your Enterprise

Optimizing The End-User Experience
Across Your Enterprise
A white paper
By Ed HallockSenior Director of Solutions ManagementOptimizing The End-User Experience Across Your Enterprise
The End-User Experience: The True Measure of with effective monitoring of the end-user experience and culminates Business Success with the ability to correlate what the user is experiencing (the business reality) with what is happening within the IT infrastructure.Expectations of business users have changed and continue to increase in scope. Historically, most IT organizations simply reacted Delivering A Successful End-User Experience to user problems and issues as they emerged, hopeful that a IT infrastructure management involves more than just monitoring the manageable number of low-impact, end-user-discovered problems performance and availability of the systems and network. Performance would arrive as problem tickets. Usually the first indication of any and availability of the IT infrastructure can appear to be at peak problem was a user call to the Help Desk. If that call didn't come in, performance, yet some users might be receiving less-than-desirable the assumption was that everything must be working fine. However, response times from their applications. The cause of this problem in reality, a customer might have encountered an unacceptable could be geographically isolated, due to some routing through the performance issue and moved on to a competitor without network, or it might be related to application usage patterns for a communicating the issue. specific type of user. The application user interface design may not lend This traditional reactive approach to the end-user experience is itself to a desired response time experience for the end-user. Regardless rapidly becoming obsolete in today's Web-based and user-centric of the underlying cause, IT teams must first understand what end users world. The new reality is that end-user expectations and high levels are actually experiencing with the application. of performance against Service Level Agreements (SLAs) must be Large organizations demand ongoing availability and reliability from achieved or the organization risks the loss of business. As a result, their IT systems. This requires enterprises to deploy tools to monitor today's IT organizations must be able to answer accurately the response time because they provide invaluable information for following critical questions at any point in time: establishing and meeting service-level goals, as well as for interpreting . Are the business services the customers are relying on available? performance and the end-user experience-all of which result in increased customer satisfaction. Response time monitoring software . Are they providing acceptable and expected response time? monitors application performance from the perspective of the end user and works seamlessly with existing infrastructure management tools to In today's competitive marketplace, your customers, regardless of ensure business IT availability and accountability at all times. whether they're internal or external, expect perfect IT delivery of business services. A poor customer experience can cost the company Response time tools provide meaningful, accurate measurements a missed revenue opportunity and a potential future revenue stream. that can be used to understand the response-time characteristics of To understand the quality of business services, you must be able to business-critical applications. In some cases, real-time monitoring map the end-user experience to the performance of the underlying (observation) of individual end users is required to determine usage infrastructure and components. You have to be able to measure and patterns; in other situations, robotic/synthetic transaction simulation confidently know, on a continuous 24/7 basis, the following key end- is needed to determine if geographic location is affecting end- user performance questions: user response times. Synchronizing business objectives with the measurable and reportable performance of IT components allows . Are users in different regions experiencing different response times? organizations to clearly structure and define their role in the IT . What are end users experiencing? enterprise as well as to significantly increase their clients' satisfaction.
. What is considered "slow" from an end-user perspective? Synth... [download for more]