A Horse of a Different Color

Mr. Doug McClure, a veteran in the area of system management tools, presents a list of companies providing end-user performance management tools on his blog (http://dougmcclure.net/blog/).  This is certainly a great list, and I thank Doug for his effort. 

Indisputably new Web technologies, like SOA, virtualization, SaaS, Web 2.0 help organizations cut cost and improve business agility.  But the downside has been increasing complexity in Web applications and infrastructure with the side-effect of making life in IT miserable.

As Doug points out: “application performance is irrelevant if the end user isn’t getting the service he or she wants.”  With complex Web applications, there are many “moving parts” with unknown performance characteristics between the end user and the data center serving-up the application.  More and more of these “moving parts” are supplied by third-parties as companies outsource their data center and network functions.  Furthermore, with SOA and SaaS, even portions of the application are supplied by third party providers at run-time.
 
The bottom line is that end users might not be receiving adequate service levels even if the servers or the data center is running just fine.  Therefore, the only viable measurement of application performance is from the end users’ perspective.  And that drives the growth of the market for end-user performance monitoring tools.

But not all the tools on Doug’s list do the same thing. in a complex world, not all end-user performance management tools manage the same thing. 

Each one is a horse of a different color. For example, Tealeaf “TiVos” all interactions between users with the Web site to show how end users are using the Web site.  Coradiant, on the other hand, sniffs network traffic to estimate round-trip response time of http traffic making and gather data for network performance analysis. 

My company, Symphoniq, takes an application-oriented approach.  We designed a tool to non-intrusively monitor performance at the browser and tag and trace any ill-performing transactions from end-to-end, exposing errors, bugs, crashes, or bottlenecks that cause slow-downs.  The information that Symphoniq provides is actionable, meaning that you can rely on the information to automatically triage the problem so that the right domain expert can be assigned to tackle the right problem.

So it's not as simple as finding a horse to ride. You need to find the right horse to get your where you want to go.