Succeed with Workspace Analytics for IT
There are 3 pillars of workspace analytics :
Digital experience monitoring (DEM)
Event Correlation and Analysis
Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is a newly defined area within the world of Application Performance Monitoring (APM).
Gartner defines DEM as “an availability and performance monitoring discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, as it interacts with enterprise applications and services. For the purposes of this evaluation, it includes real-user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) for both web- and mobile-based end users.”
Leading Tools for Digital Experience Monitoring: RUM and STM
Real user monitoring (RUM) gives you the answers by recording all interactions with your applications from the user’s point of view. Your development and operations teams will be able to swiftly trace errors and diagnose the specific application point of failure. RUM keeps track of actual service-level quality delivered to end user’s device.
Before you release any app into production, though, you should conduct a reasonable amount of testing to eliminate potential errors and performance bottlenecks. How can you test your apps thoroughly when they are is still in a development or pre-production stage? Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) simulates user actions with behavioral scripts. This insight is mission-critical if you are running an online store or any site where you can reasonably expect traffic spikes. These anomalies are how your performance engineers will be able to identify and eliminate application issues before the customer reports them.
Mobile monitoring has to include not only your server performance but how your tools specifically execute on native mobile platforms. Outside of mobile, DEM concerns itself with web apps delivered to a traditional browser. Meanwhile, on the back end, there are APIs and code execution that may cause slowdown and impact the overall user experience.
The customers of today and tomorrow expect all of your online tools and communications channels to work flawlessly. Whether you’re undergoing your own digital transformation or consolidating an existing strategy, the customer expectations are the only measure that matter and performance is your only key to success. Luckily, your customers are rarely disappointed, due to advances in APM suite technologies. To keep that unstated promise as more devices come online and put increasing strain on the capacity of the user-experience, you will need full visibility into all available channels and a central command to watch over them. That is why the acronym DEM is about to get a lot more play in offices all over the planet and why a solid DEM strategy is critical to your business success.
With more organizations focused on digital transformation a DEM strategy is critical Below are nine reasons why organizations need to move from APM to DEM.
1. The Internet of Things
These machine to machine transactions are just as important to monitor as the human to machine interactions to avoid damage to brand and customer satisfaction.
For mobile the necessary information means not only monitoring performance of the application from mobile devices and providers but also monitoring the APIs delivering content to the mobile application. Mobile applications rely on APIs to communicate with back end infrastructure. Ensuring these APIs are returning valid information with no errors or delays is a critical component of a DEM strategy.
No application uses a single protocol. What protocols matter to your organization and are they all being monitored? Solutions that only monitor HTTP can leave gaps in your monitoring strategy. Are key business applications using FTP, WebSockets? if so these protocols need to be included in a DEM strategy.
4. User experience is no longer about page load time
There has been a shift in the web performance space away from page load time as the metric to measure in terms of how well an application performs. What matters more is how the user perceived the loading of the page. It doesn’t matter to the user if elements they can’t see aren’t loading, they only care about when they can interact with the page. Measurements such as Speed Index, Critical Resources Index and Perceptual Speed Index have emerged to attempt to measure the perceived page load time.
With Agile development, releases are happening at a much higher cadence, requiring companies to continuously test and optimize their applications to stay in business. Even with testing, code releases can cause unexpected performance degradation. Being notified about these as soon as possible leads to a faster resolution or roll back if needed. It isn’t possible to test every permutation of browser, device, and network provider which is why companies are including RUM as a part of their DEM strategy.
Information is being served and shared on an almost constant basis. Phones and computers are constantly informing us of the arrival of a new message, tweet, sports update, etc. It sometimes feels like we are overwhelmed with information, but we have also come to expect this. The outrage that occurs when information isn’t immediately available quickly spreads and can cause organizations to lose customers.
7. Influence of social media
Today when news breaks, or an application is unavailable information spreads quickly across social media. These days stories of site outages aren’t as newsworthy as they once were. What matters more is not the details about the issue but rather how the organization handled the communication. If your site is having issues, users will flood online to share their negative feelings. The need to track and monitor social sentiment is becoming more critical. Transparency during issues is needed. Responding to social messages quickly and sharing details on progress is expected.
8. Need to reduce spend on running IT
Would you rather spend money on fun things like vacations, a nice bottle of wine, or a new car; or do you want all of your money to go towards your mortgage/rent, groceries, and utilities? If you’re like me you want money to spend on the fun things. Businesses are the same way, the less money spent on the running of IT frees up more money to be spent on fun things like innovation.
9. Maintain a competitive advantage
Failing to keep up with demands of digital consumers will drive companies behind, and today the majority of consumers are digital. With a DEM strategy you can find valuable performance insights in application performance data and user behavior. Survey results from Digital Enterprise Journal’s recent Digital Transformation Benchmark found that competition is increasingly important to organizations. Half of the statements have to do with competition.
Asset Optimisation (AO) is a structured approach to optimise business operations by identifying, defining, planning and implementing initiatives that will unleash significant value improvement potential from current assets.
This value improvement could come from, for example, increased productivity, enhanced efficiency and capital spend optimisation.
Asset Optimization enables asset intensive organizations to respond faster and make better decisions that directly impact the bottom line by:
-> Improving resource utilization and optimizing complex maintenance tasks
-> Improving equipment reliability and reducing overall asset lifecycle costs
-> Increasing safety and reducing regulatory risk using industry standard configuration management processes
-> Improving the management of materials, inventory and equipment to raise the visibility and lower the cost of your supply chain
-> Improve the management of people, their skills and their tasks to optimize productivity of your workforce
-> Providing solutions driven by industry best practices to drive standardization across your fleet
Event Correlation and Analysis
Event correlation is a technique for making sense of a large number of events and pinpointing the few events that are really important in that mass of information. This is accomplished by looking for and analyzing relationships between events.
Event correlation usually takes place inside one or several management platforms. It is implemented by a piece of software known as the event correlator. This component is automatically fed with events originating from managed elements (applications, devices), monitoring tools, the Trouble Ticket System, etc. Each event captures something special (from the event source standpoint) that happened in the domain of interest to the event correlator, which will vary depending upon the type of analysis the correlator is attempting to perform.
The event correlator plays a key role in integrated management, for only within it do events from many disparate sources come together and allow for comparison across sources. For instance, this is where the failure of a service can be ascribed to a specific failure in the underlying IT infrastructure, or where the root cause of a potential security attack can be identified.
Most event correlators can receive events from trouble ticket systems. However, only some of them are able to notify trouble ticket systems when a problem is solved, which partly explains the difficulty for Service Desks to keep updated with the latest news. In theory, the integration of management in organizations requires the communication between the event correlator and the trouble ticket system to work both ways.
Event correlation and analysis (ECA) is IT’s time machine. By saving data collected about a system, workspace analytics solutions provide a record of what was happening on a system at any given point in time. If your house caught on fire, chances are you’d like to know why. ECA is about discovering where the smoke detectors are going off and examining the surrounding infrastructure to be able to quell the flame and, eventually, put measures in place to prevent similar incidents in the future. ECA capabilities within workspace analytics solutions have the end goal of solving IT problems quickly, and (ideally) automatically.
