From agents to appliances: Capturing the client experience, Part 1

Network/Systems Management This newsletter is sponsored by Sendio White Paper: Can You Trust Your Inbox? Your email is a vital part of everyday business productivity. But is also an extremely dangerous application, delivering viruses, worms, identity thefts and more to your computer daily. In this free report, you'll learn about the top email spam myths, and why believing them can put your business data at serious risk. Network World's Network/Systems Management Newsletter, 08/13/07 From agents to appliances: Capturing the client experience, Part 1 By Denise Dubie Last week I talked a bit about the need -- or the lack thereof -- of agent software to monitor endpoint machines, such as desktops and laptops. This week I am focusing on appliances, installed at various points across a network to capture the critical client, or end-user, experience with applications on desktops and laptops. "The ultimate judge of IT and business alignment is the end user; If alignment is viewed as conformity to user expectations in terms of availability, usability and accuracy, then monitoring end user performance is the only way IT knows that it is meeting these expectations," writes Jean-Pierre Garbani, a vice president at Forrester Research, in a recent report. The report Forrester Research recently put out examines examining the market, which includes management heavyweights such as CA as well as innovative newcomers such as Coradiant. The appliance-based end user experience monitoring vendors had similar technical approaches to capturing this critical metric, Forrester found, but the vendors distinctly targeted four specific markets: business marketing, global application performance debugging, Web-based application performance, and Java 2 Enterprise Edition and .Net application management. New Executive Guide Network World has recently published an executive guide entitled "Virtualization Meets Reality". Find out the 8 key challenges of virtualizing your data center. Download it now! To start, Forrester looked at how companies including Adlex (acquired by Compuware), NetQoS, BeatBox (acquired by Mercury Interactive now part of HP), Coradiant and Tealeaf Technology approached the technical challenge of capturing the client experience. In general, the vendors place an appliance loaded with their respective software in a central location. A data collector component connects to a switch and passively monitors traffic and a reporting server aggregates data from one or more data collectors. This method does not require agents on client desktops, which makes sense since if you are measuring the performance of Web applications most companies can't access customer desktops and place an agent there. "On the downside, this type of configuration does not provide any insight into what happens at the desktop level, nor does it lend itself to all types of applications: Only IP-based protocols are decoded to provide information; many times, even this is restricted to some application-level protocols," the report reads. Yet on the plus side, appliances are easier to deploy and maintain for most enterprise IT shops, the report says. It is located centrally and requires just a network connection and some configuration on the box. Also because when analyzing applications, as mentioned before, you are often dealing with Web-based applications, the desktop isn't accessible to IT. But these appliances can capture "detailed analysis" of network, server, database and application response times -- "yielding business-oriented information while analyzing errors" to provide application information, Forrester says.   What do you think? Post a comment on this newsletter

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Contact the author: Senior Editor Denise Dubie covers the technologies, products and services that address network, systems, application and IT service management for Network World. E-mail Denise. This newsletter is sponsored by Sendio White Paper: Can You Trust Your Inbox? Your email is a vital part of everyday business productivity. But is also an extremely dangerous application, delivering viruses, worms, identity thefts and more to your computer daily. In this free report, you'll learn about the top email spam myths, and why believing them can put your business data at serious risk. ARCHIVE Archive of the Network/Systems Management Newsletter. BONUS FEATURE IT PRODUCT RESEARCH AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Get detailed information on thousands of products, conduct side-by-side comparisons and read product test and review results with Network World’s IT Buyer’s Guides. Find the best solution faster than ever with over 100 distinct categories across the security, storage, management, wireless, infrastructure and convergence markets. Click here for details. PRINT SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE You've got the technology snapshot of your choice delivered to your inbox each day. Extend your knowledge with a print subscription to the Network World newsweekly, Apply here today. International subscribers, click here. SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES To subscribe or unsubscribe to any Network World newsletter, change your e-mail address or contact us, click here. This message was sent to: networking.world@gmail.com. Please use this address when modifying your subscription. Advertising information: Write to Associate Publisher Online Susan Cardoza Network World, Inc., 118 Turnpike Road, Southborough, MA 01772 Copyright Network World, Inc., 2007