It has been well-documented that monitoring end user experience is critical. We touched upon this in our last blog. After all, the functioning of the delivery architecture is successful if the end user can complete his/her task smoothly. But as with every result, the means to achieve it matter too. In our fact finding study of the Indian BFSI sector, we found that most respondents did not measure end user performance comprehensively. One of the key factors they highlighted was the extra costs involved.

Measuring the end-user experience requires the IT team to deploy specialized end user monitoring tools. This incurs extra cost in terms of the tool purchase, bringing on board additional resources for monitoring and therefore, their training.

This is compounded by the issue of geographical spread as BFSI organizations widen their network from urban to semi-urban and rural areas. When applications are deployed to these regions, there is a lot of variance in the performance measures. This is because different internet service providers offer different service standards. Monitoring distributed applications encompasses a large and changing set of users, applications, types of measurements, and platforms, adding to the cost element.

Now add to this the interesting views put forward in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for this year. The report states that applications have become far more difficult to monitor owing to architectures, in general, becoming more modular, redundant, distributed and dynamic. This, in turn, changes the application code more frequently. The resultant web of complexities renders the traditional system/monitoring tools practically, useless. You can’t help but sympathize in a situation like this.

But I have to point out here that tools aren’t the only answer. Measuring application performance from an end-user perspective has a lot more to do with the way they are delivered. The system architecture and how it can be optimized to deliver applications and measure their performance. This is where technologies like VDI come handy. Not just because it creates a standardized operating environment and delivery architecture but also because it enables an organization to put in place enforceable SLAs that can be easily translated into end-user SLAs. In essence, a technology layer is optimized to deliver end-user intelligence by a process layer that defines the softer aspects.