BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring overview

The BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring and Analytics product provides end user-centric performance monitoring that helps IT ensure the quality and availability of web-based applications, determine whether applications meet service-level objectives, and proactively find and fix problems. BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring can be hosted as a service, in your environment (on premises), or in a hybrid environment.

The following topics provide a brief introduction to the product components and functions:

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring business value

As user expectations rise and front- and back-end application architecture becomes more complex, it is more important than ever to understand how your customers and users experience your application. BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring supports the following business needs:

Ensuring customer satisfaction by proactively monitoring web application performance and availability from the end-user perspective
Measuring service levels
Identifying web application problems before customers call for help
Diagnosing and restoring services faster
Predicting the performance of a web application prior to deployment

With end-user experience monitoring implemented, IT Operations can perform the following functions:

Monitor the end-user user experience and prioritize issues based on end-user impact
Monitor traffic, availability, and performance of web applications
Monitor application health and performance
Monitor synthetic transactions to predict application health and user experience when BMC Synthetic End User Experience Monitoring is implemented
Detect and diagnose the root cause of problems
Generate reports to ensure that service level agreements (SLAs) are being met
Run historical queries based on exported data
Diagnose application problems and trace end-user experience problems to the application when BMC Application Diagnostics is integrated
Monitor application infrastructure performance through integration with BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management

What is real-time, end-user experience monitoring and how does it work?

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring uses packet capture analysis to passively watch actual transactions from real users as they interact with a web application across physical and cloud environments, the internet, corporate networks, and content delivery networks (CDNs). BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring delivers accurate, real-time transaction and detection information about sessions, applications, and content levels.

A Real User Collector captures user sessions in real time, and a Real User Analyzer reports on errors and slow performance through the BMC Application Management Console to help IT fix problems when they occur.

For more information, see End-user-experience-traffic-data-capture-and-segmentation

What does the system watch?

The system monitors web traffic (a data stream across a digital network between a client computer and a web server). In web-based applications, the user’s browser software sends requests to a web server by using HTTP or HTTPS. The web server responds with the pages, images, and other documents the browser requested. The result of these individual requests is a web page.

For more information, see End-user-experience-session-page-and-object-type-detection.

What does the system report?

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring creates web application metrics from the web traffic data collected, identified, and used in analysis. You can directly query the metrics or drill down to the metrics through dashlets, Watchpoints, reports, and session analysis. For example, the Application Performance Reporter dashlet shows the network performance of your web applications over a specified period of time. You can see areas where end users are experiencing poor performance due to high network usage. This information can help to identify areas where your web application performance can be improved by using content acceleration services such as Akamai.

Application Performance Reporter dashlet

The BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring Aggregation Server for Extended Reporting component enables extended performance reporting and analysis. Extended Reporting is an optional component that provides additional analysis capabilities and reporting derived from BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring performance metrics. With Extended Reporting, you can deliver reports designed to address the needs of business owners or other technical stakeholders in the organization.

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring integrations

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring can be integrated with the following BMC products:

The BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management integration via the BMC PATROL Knowledge Module for Real End User Experience Monitoring product enables you to monitor end-user experience from a service model and determine if an end-user problem is related to an infrastructure component problem.
The BMC Atrium CMDB integration enables you to pinpoint the configuration item (CI) associated with an application-performance problem via the Service-Context-dashlet.
The BMC Service Level Management integration feeds performance metrics about end user experience to BMC SLM via the BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring plug-in

You can extend BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring through the following third-party integrations:

Through integration with Akamai's Content Delivery Network, monitor the performance of web applications distributed on multiple servers across the internet.
Through BMC's MarketZone partnership with Aternity, monitor end-user performance with mobile and traditional clients.

You can also use the data-export and configuration APIs available in this product to integrate it with business-intelligence and reporting products, management solutions, and custom applications.

For complete information, see Integrating.