It’s good to see the folks running “N-Tiers without the Tears” posting again. In this post they talk about maturing into Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring and the potential pitfallas associated with it.
The point they make is that for true end-to-end service monitoring, every layer and every component of the service must be instrumented and monitored in such a way to provide the right level of visibility and data/information at the right time for each audience. Such a simple thing to say, but a very difficult thing to accomplish. This isn’t due to a lack of technology capability, but due to those organizational/functional silos within IT.
In my past life, I ran no fewer than five different QoE tools to try and provide visibility into what our external and internal customers experienced. While I believe in using these capabilities to “tie” together all of the traditional monitoring, I spent more time defending the quality of the data than providing any realy value to the business with the tools. Every organization/functional silo in IT had to save face, defend their turf and find a way to point their finger and someone else in the service delivery chain.
One approach that can help understand QoE and provide a very simple way to dialogue with the business is called Apdex – or the Application Performance Index. Think of it as a MOS score (if you’re familiar with VoIP) or like your FICO credit score for service performance. It’s goal is to establish apples to apples way of assessing application and service performance based on the needs of those who use those applications and services. It will give you a way to normalize all of your data points collected from all of your QoE tools into one uniform assessment regardless of how one vendor does things compared to another. Check them out if you’re doing QoE or synthetic transaction testing.
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