Monitoring User Experience and Application Performance

Tips on Maintaining Visibility across the User to Application Chain …

The Impact of Poor User Experience

Poor application performance continues to be an ongoing frustration for users and negatively impacts the business bottom line. In this blog post we examine the components that impact application performance and explain why bandwidth monitoring tools are no longer enough to maintain positive user experience.

Networks are increasingly complex and are critical for business productivity. Applications are delivered from both remote cloud and on-premise services, users are highly distributed with an increasing mix of work-from home and in office workers, and the underlying technologies, such as SD-WAN, make enterprise wide visibility challenging.

Bandwidth Monitoring Just Isn’t Enough

When application performance issues occur, the first reaction is to blame the network. To address performance issues, network engineering teams have deployed a range of tools that monitor bandwidth to assess issues like throughput and congestion. Bandwidth monitoring tools based on protocols such as SNMP and NetFlow have been very effective in measuring throughput and usage across the network to help in identifying potential bottlenecks and anomalous traffic. Bandwidth monitoring solutions are very good at telling you what the problem isn’t, as opposed to what the problem actually is.

Often times, the solution is to simple throw more bandwidth at the problem in the hope that application performance issues will go away.

Visibility Across the User-to-Application Chain

As more cloud based applications are deployed, this simplistic bandwidth monitoring approach is no longer sufficient. Effective network monitoring must go further to track performance from the keyboard to the application and back. Byte25 call this the user-to-application chain. The response time experienced by users when they hit enter is dependent on a number of components that go beyond just bandwidth that must all work seamlessly to deliver applications and maintain the user experience.

By way of example, the user-to-application chain typically starts at the PC when the user initiates an application transaction, data traverses the local WiFi network, then via the CPE to the last mile connection to the service provider, across the Internet and finally to the data center hosting the application server … and then return. Degradation of any single component in this user-to-application chain can seriously impact user experience.

Visibility tools need to be aware of all these components and have the ability to continually track and report on key metrics across the complete user-to-application chain. The ability to correlate data from different components is critical in identifying potential performance issues and maintaining user performance. For example, when diagnosing user performance complaints, the ability to correlate application response time, with DNS lookup times and WiFi quality is essential in being able to rapidly identify potential issues in the user application chain.

Critical Collection Metrics

Byte25 have identified the critical components that potentially negatively impact application performance and end user experience. Whilst bandwidth certainly plays a part in maintain performance, experience has shown that bandwidth alone is rarely the root cause of performance issues. To maintain positive user experience and to assist in identifying and resolving application performance issues, visibility into the following areas is critical.

Byte25 take a holistic approach to network visibility to monitor all aspects of the user-to-application chain. By collecting and correlating data from different sources such as endpoint data, WiFi performance metrics, synthetic transactions data, combined with comprehensive deep packet inspection, SNMP and NetFlow monitoring, Byte25 can provide a complete visibility solution for reporting and diagnostics across the entire enterprise covering the complete user-to-application chain.

For more information or to schedule a demonstration or trial of the Byte25 ,

please contact Byte25 directly at sales@byte25.com