The operational role in modern IT

In most organizations, a team of technicians is responsible for operating the applications the company uses. Smaller companies have a general-purpose IT staff that runs everything from e-mail to file storage to desktops; other, larger organizations have specialists for different tasks.

It is common for a network operations center (NOC) to run a network; similarly, operations teams also run software applications such as ERP, Salesforce automation, or a web application.

These teams are usually responsible for its performance management, availability, traffic levels, and reliability. they also oversee the rollout and testing of new versions of the application, and handle support queries from end users. Performance management may mean: Performance measurement is the process of assessing progress toward achieving predetermined goals, while performance management is building on that process adding the relevant communication and action on the progress achieved against these predetermined goals (Bourne, M.,Franco, M. and Wilkes, J. (2003). ... In telecommunications and reliability theory, the term availability has the following meanings: 1. ... Reliability concerns quality or consistency. ...

In more traditional applications, the end-user of the application worked at the same company as the person who operated it, so diagnosing problems was relatively simple. But with more distributed applications (in particular, those run over web technology) managing performance became more difficult. Web operations teams ran tests on their application at regular intervals to get an idea of performance or to tell if the site was working. But these tests did not measure end-user performance.

As a result, companies that run web applications (or other distributed applications in which the end user is logically "far" from the operator) have a hard time operating them properly. They often take too long to detect and reproduce errors; can't see the impact of a change on their environments; and fail to report on actual end-user experience.

Real User Monitoring defined

Real user monitoring (RUM) is a passive web monitoring technology that records all user interaction with a website. Monitoring actual user interaction with a website is important to website operators to determine if users are being served quickly and without errors. Software as a Service (SaaS) and Application Service Providers (ASP) use RUM to monitor and manage service quality delivered to their clients. Real user monitoring data is used to determine the actual service-level quality delivered to end-users (also known as Quality of Experience, QoE) and to detect errors or slowdowns on web sites. The data may also be used to determine if changes that are promulgated to sites has the desired effect or causes errors. This page as shown in the AOL 9. ... Software as a Service (SaaS) is a model of software delivery where the software company provides maintenance, daily technical operation, and support for the software provided to their client. ... An application service provider (ASP) is a business that provides computer-based services to customers over a network. ... A website, Web site or WWW site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of webpages, that is, HTML/XHTML documents accessible via HTTP on the Internet; all publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web. ...

Organizations also use RUM to test website changes prior to deployment by monitoring for errors or slowdowns in the pre-deployment phase.

Real user monitoring is typically "passive monitoring," i.e. the RUM device collects web traffic without having any effect on the operation of the site. In some limited cases it also uses Javascript injected into a page to provide feedback from the browser. The passive monitoring approach is more accurate than synthetic monitoring for determing the actual service quality delivered to end-users. Passive monitoring (also know as real user monitoring) records the performance actual customers experience on a website. ... Passive monitoring (also know as real user monitoring) records the performance actual customers experience on a website. ... Synthetic monitoring (also known as active monitoring) is website monitoring that is done using a web browser emulation. ...

Passive monitoring can be very helpful in troubleshooting performance problems once they have occurred. Passive monitoring differs from synthetic monitoring in that it relies on actual inbound and outbound web traffic to take measurements, so actual problems may be observed and the cause of the problem may be traced. Passive monitoring (also know as real user monitoring) records the performance actual customers experience on a website. ... Passive monitoring (also know as real user monitoring) records the performance actual customers experience on a website. ... Synthetic monitoring (also known as active monitoring) is website monitoring that is done using a web browser emulation. ...

Image:Coradiant PCL Report Showing High Latency.gif

(figure 1. Performance Compliance report giving a high-level overview of actual site latency and Quality of Service on a typical Web site)

Real user monitoring measures the performance and availability experienced by actual users, diagnoses individual incidents, and tracks the impact of a change or changes to a web application. Real user monitoring products have enjoyed increased popularity in recent years, in part due to the growth of web-based applications for business-to-business communication and the rapid adoption of SaaS tools like Salesforce.com, Rightnow Technologies, Taleo, and others.

Other types of tests that are used to measure website performance include:

• Synthetic monitoring tests - scripted tests at regular intervals from idealized environments such as colocated data centers
• Web log analysis or web analytics - reports on user activity within a website to analyze buying patterns and search engine activity
• Sniffers - tools that capture packet traces, including the popular (and free) WireShark (the recently-renamed Etheral)
• Flow monitoring products - devices or software that count traffic by packet and host or network, similar to nTop or other monitoring tools

A separate set of technologies are used for web macro recording from web browser actions and replaying them to automate repetitive tasks; but these are not generally used for operational activity monitoring and are instead dedicated to Quality Assurance testing. In some cases, such browser-based macros are used as a form of synthetic testing; but they are not monitoring the activity of real users on the site. Synthetic monitoring (also known as active monitoring) is website monitoring that is done using a web browser emulation. ... Web analytics is the measurement of the behavior of visitors to a website. ... Packet sniffers (also known as network or protocol analyzers or Ethernet sniffers) are computer software (usually) or computer hardware that can intercept and log traffic passing over a digital network or part of a network. ...

Note that web log analysis, packet sniffing, and flow monitoring all derive data from actual end-user activity. The difference between these and real-user monitoring technology is that they do not attempt to reassemble traffic at the user level into the component objects, pages, and sessions. For example, a 10-minute TCP session may be one large object or hundreds of small objects; it may be one end-user or dozens behind a proxy. Without peering above ISO layer 4 and interpreting the state machine of the application, this information isn't visible. ISO has many meanings: Iso is the stem of the Latin transliteration of the Greek word ίσος (ísos, meaning equal). The iso- prefix in English derives from this and means equality or similarity. ... In the theory of computation, a finite state machine (FSM) or finite state automaton (FSA) is an abstract machine that has only a finite, constant amount of memory. ...

Real user monitoring providers

• Coradiant

Real user monitoring products

• Moniforce webProbe
• Coradiant TrueSight Real-User Monitor