Aternity and the End User Experience Monitoring Space

I recently attended a webinar presented by Aternity, Forrester and Intel entitled “Redefining End User Experience Management: Top 10 Keys to Success for IT and Line-of-Business Management”. Replay available here. Not sure why Forrester and Intel were really there other than to add credibility to the start up Aternity. Intel seemed way out of place promoting some fancy new desktop virtualization stuff.

Aternity sits firmly in the end user experience and performance management space. It’s sales and marketing pitch is that they’re unique because their platform empowers every work station to become a self monitoring platform that is user-aware; arming IT and business executives with empirical evidence on how usage and performance impacts business. As they say, “We are redefining end user management.”

As usual, there was no discussion of the technical details of the product or technology. I asked a few questions in the chat but the answers were not technical enough or the questions skipped due to time. This is a desktop agent based product. No agent = no visibility. They’re not snooping the wire with a span port here. He mentioned other agents were installed elsewhere but I’m not sure if they install an agent across all of your systems (I hope not).

Aternity competes against the following companies. I’m interested in comments or feedback on any of these companies and their products/technology. I hope to be able to learn more about how their products work and how they can serve as a key input into a maturing business service management solution.

One of the key debates within this space is the approach taken to measure end user experience and performance. Do I need to put an agent on the desktop, instrument the Web or Application U/I, turn on a span port on the switch, use special agents on all the servers, use an appliance, etc. I see a chart is needed for this. 🙂 Also, this should fit nicely into Ryan Shopp’s Data Center Automation Blueprint series on his blog here.

End User Experience and Performance Management Space

• Serden
• Symphoniq [Upcoming webinar on 2/26]
• Knoa
• Premitech
• Tealeaf
• Coradiant
• Citrix – EdgeSight
• Moniforce (Oracle) – webProbe, uxInsight
• NetQoS – SuperAgent
• Lucent VitalSuite – The VitalAgent was probably one of the earliest end user agents on the market. Their agent had some really cool capabilities.
• Compuware – Compuware has a desktop agent as part of its Vantage suite. They could really turn their Adlex acquisition into something powerful along the lines of end-user experience and performance management, but it’s still a stand alone, non-integrated product.
• Quest Software – As part of the Foglight suite, they have an end user management and monitoring capability.
• IBM – ITCAM for RT/WRT
• HP – BTO User Experience Products
• CA – Wiley Customer Experience Manager (did CA have anything pre-Wiley, part of Aprisma/Spectrum or Unicenter?)
• BMC – Transaction Management Application Response Time / Real Experience Monitor
• Others?

The Top 10 list came from JP Garbani of Forrester, not from Aternity. Aternity’s eloquent CEO Trevor Matz attempted to align his company’s technology or product to this top 10 list.

1 – Stop living in the past (go beyond the data center, the holy grail is the end user experience)

*DLM* I agree, but ultimately the operations and support staff want to be told where the problem is. If we’re not doing the fundamentals of network, systems, application and service management and monitoring, we’re not going to be able to correlate end user experience issues to something blinking in the datacenter.

Correlation also must be done to understand the impact that poor performance and experience has on the end user. How much does it impact their productivity? The business in terms of sales or managing client relationships? How many more transactions (sales, orders, widgets) could be completed if the end-to-end transaction completed 5 seconds faster? This my friend, is the holy grail.

2 – Bigger picture, deeper perspective – (design a strategy for end-to-end end user experience visibility – from desktops to app performance to productivity (I asked if Aternity supported the Apdex initiative but this question did not get answered)

*DLM* Absolutely. See above.

3 – Capture it visually – (have the ability to collect, correlate, and analyze the data into usable dashboards/reports that display real business intelligence in a matter that easily conveys trends and offer a level of predictive analysis)

*DLM* Absolutely. This must be at the edge. Every end user should be able to craft the visual message they want to consume. We don’t need to share the gory details of the trasnaction performance or end user experience to everyone, especially to those outside of the operations and support organizations. We need to aggregate and communicate information and data in the language of the audience. You’re loosing this much money because the transactions from the UK take 30 seconds longer than those in Brazil. If you were to add more capacity here, you could increase the sales orders by 250 per day.

4 – Make friends – (IT management and LoB management must work together to achieve advanced end user experience management – get together regularly to discuss objectives, improvements and processes.)

*DLM* Very important not just at the top levels, but ALL THE WAY down through the organizational silos. The guys who manage the tools or the application support teams must all know the language of the business and FULLY understand how important the end-to-end service and experience is to the business. The fact that it takes the CEO’s secretary 7 minutes to open the shared spreadsheet on the file server could be the most important end user experience metric for the Windows SystemAdmin group. Especially if that spreadsheet contains the CEO’s weekly status report metrics. Stuff like this is important to someone, and with the visibility that technology like Aternity’s, the Windows SystemAdmins can be the heros too.

5 – Smart Virtualization – (embrace real-time technology for enterprise class virtualization)

*DLM* Not quite sure how this fits into the concepts talked about here other than the benefits of an “on demand” architecture on end user experience and performance.

6 – Get a bat phone – (Make sure your end user management strategy and any tools/software you implement/select handles alerts and triggers IT/help desk users – lowering the risk of disruption to frontline users)

*DLM* Ah yes, the customer monitoring system. Direct result of not doing the basics well enough, not correlating and enriching fine grained data with business services and applications context and living in a reactive world. Technology such as this and a focus on the basics can help you become more proactive and help deflect customer calls reporting problems. Now, organizational change and maturity to become proactive is an entire different story.

7 – Play nice – (Ensure your end user experience management tools integrate into your existing architecture.)

*DLM* Sounded like Aternity plays nice and integrates into existing architectures via the expected methods. I’d probably want the ability to integrate into the companies collaboration tools such as IM or the Portal/Intranet so I can send out proactive notifications of application or user experience problems.

8 – Don’t boil the ocean – (start small)

*DLM* Very important. Get the small wins. Ask how things have improved. Don’t accept soft benefits, try to get tangible value identified. Review, review, review frequently and often. Make immediate changes as the business needs change. Iterate from here across the business based on your own lessons learned.

9 – So SOA – (any tools/software applications you use for end user experience management should fit into your existing architecture via a loosely coupled, SOA approach)

*DLM* Please show me any vendors IT Mgmt/Monitoring tools with a SOA capability?!

10 – Come together – (gain a widespread view of which systems/applications should be included in your end user experience management project for a truly holistic view.)

*DLM* It may be a shocker to some, but not everything must be managed and monitored. The business needs should prevail here. If you’ve got 10,000 servers, but only 5,000 of those support the businesses most critical and valuable services and applications, you’d better have the best instrumentation, visibility, management and monitoring for that 5,000. I don’t see enough prioritization like this but rather clients just looking for the “check box” that we have got all the bases covered. With the amount of resources shrinking for the traditional monitoring tools groups, you’ve got to focus on what is most important today and get to the rest as you can.