security user experience
security user experience
With the proliferation of composite applications for cloud and mobility, monitoring individual components of the application delivery chain is no longer an effective way to assure user experience. IT organizations must evolve toward a holistic, unified, and more collaborative methodology based on a service-delivery principle that is more aligned with corporate strategy.
The more business processes come to depend on multiple applications and the underlying infrastructure, the more susceptible they are to performance degradation. Unfortunately, most enterprises still monitor and manage user experience from traditional technology domain silos, such as server, network, application, operating system or security. As computing and processes continue to shift from legacy architecture, this approach only perpetuates an ineffective, costly and politically-charged environment.
Key drivers necessitating change include widespread adoption of virtualization technologies and associated virtual machine (VM) migration, cloud balancing between public, hybrid and private cloud environments, and the traffic explosion of latency-sensitive applications such as streaming video and voice-over-IP (VoIP).
The migration toward IaaS providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft underscore the need for holistic user experience assurance across multiple data centers, which are increasingly beyond the corporate firewall. Moreover, as video joins VoIP as a primary traffic generator competing for bandwidth on enterprise networks, users and upper management will become increasingly intolerant of poor performance.
By having different tools for monitoring data, VoIP and video traffic, enterprise IT silos experience rising cost, complexity and mean time to repair. Traditionally, IT has used delay, jitter and packet loss as proxies for network performance. Legacy network performance management (NPM) tools were augmented with WAN optimization technology to accelerate traffic between data center and branch office user.
A more granular approach is to look at application payload and measuring the quality of voice and video communications. For unified communications (UC), this includes monitoring signaling between the UC components.
Meanwhile, conventional application performance management (APM) tools monitor performance of individual servers rather than across the application delivery chain - from the web front end through business logic processes to the database. While synthetic transactions provide a clearer view into user experience, they tend to add overhead. They also do not experience the same network latencies that are common to branch office networks since they originate in the same data center as the application server. Finally, being synthetic, they are not representative of "live" production transactions.