More Digital Experience Monitoring
Two sets of performance metrics are closely monitored. The first set of performance metrics defines the performance experienced by end users of the application. One example of performance is average response times under peak load. The components of the set include load and response times.
The load is the volume of transactions processed by the application, e.g., transactions per second (tps), requests per second, pages per second. Without being loaded by computer-based demands for searches, calculations, transmissions, etc., most applications are fast enough, which is why programmers may not catch performance problems during development.
The response times are the times required for an application to respond to a user's actions at such a load.
The second set of performance metrics measures the computational resources used by the application for the load, indicating whether there is adequate capacity to support the load, as well as possible locations of a performance bottleneck. Measurement of these quantities establishes an empirical performance baseline for the application. The baseline can then be used to detect changes in performance. Changes in performance can be correlated with external events and subsequently used to predict future changes in application performance.
The use of APM is common for Web applications, which lends itself best to the more detailed monitoring techniques. In addition to measuring response time for a user, response times for components of a Web application can also be monitored to help pinpoint causes of delay. There also exist HTTP appliances that can decode transaction-specific response times at the Web server layer of the application.
In their APM Conceptual Framework, Gartner Research describes five dimensions of APM:
- End user experience monitoring – (active and passive)
- Application runtime architecture discovery and modeling
- User-defined transaction profiling (also called business transaction management)
- Application component monitoring
- Reporting & Application data analytics
In 2016, Gartner Research has updated its definition, into three main functional dimensions:
- End-user experience monitoring (EUEM) has been evolved to Digital experience monitoring (DEM);
- A new dimension, Application discovery, tracing and diagnostics (ADTD), combines three formerly separate dimensions (Application topology [runtime architecture] discovery and visualization, User-defined transaction profiling, and Application component deep-dive), since all three are primarily focused on problem remediation and are interlinked;
- Application analytics (AA).
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