Defining Geo PCLs to measure user experience by location on the Analyzer

Complex content delivery solutions and geographically dispersed end users make monitoring experience of your web application globally increasingly important.

Geographic location of the end users might affect the service-level thresholds (SLTs). For example, the end-to-end latency of 5,000 ms could be acceptable for end users in China but too slow for end users in New York. To bring the different performance metrics into compliance, set up geographic performance-compliance levels, or Geo PCLs.

You can configure Geo PCLs to characterize end users experience of server or application performance in a given geographic region. Geo PCLs characterize end users experience in a region as satisfied, tolerating, or frustrated.

You can set Geo PCLs for the following latency metrics:

End-to-end time (E2E)—
Time it takes to deliver an object or page to the end user, starting from the time the first packet in the request is received until the browser acknowledges the delivery of the final packet in the response.
This metric measures the end-to-end latency of the entire object or page, including HTTP redirects. The system calculates this metric as the difference between the start time of the earliest element and the end time of the last element.
Page-render time (PRT)—
Time required for the browser to load the page.
The page-render time (PRT) metric measures the time to render all content on a page, when all or some of the content comes from a source other than your origin server. The system uses a special web beacon target injected into web pages to derive PRT, which is often used for applications with any of the following characteristics:
- The application embeds third-party content in the pages.
- The application performs most processing on the client during content loading.
- The application uses content delivery networks (CDNs) to cache content closer to the user.
Because the PRT metric measures from the start of page loading in the browser until the onLoad event, it incorporates many client-side impacts that would not be apparent to the server.
Note: To use the PRT metric, you must first configure the reporting of page-render time.

Unlike the PCLs that you configure for Watchpoints, Geo PCLs apply only to the geographic zones with which you associate a Watchpoint. You can monitor them by using the Global Application Delivery dashlet (Real User Analyzer) and the Global Performance Tracker dashlet (Real User Analyzer).

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