BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring overview

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring is a unique web performance monitoring tool that:

detects problems as they occur
provides the data you need to fix them quickly
delivers accurate real-time transaction and detection information about sessions, applications, and content levels

The following topics provide a brief introduction to the products features and functions.

End-User Experience Monitoring

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring uses a technology called packet capture analysis to passively watch actual transactions from real users as they interact with a web application. Real User Collector devices capture user sessions in real time and Real User Analyzer devices report on errors and slow performance to help Web Operations teams fix problems when they occur. This process is commonly referred to as End-User Experience Monitoring (EUEM).

EUEM is substantially different from traditional approaches to performance monitoring. The system does not generate any traffic. Instead, it reads a copy of traffic from the wire, assembles what it sees into requests for objects, pages, and user sessions, and records the performance and success (or failure) of these transactions.

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 the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The web server responds with the pages, images, and other documents the browser requested. Each request and its corresponding response contain a great deal of information; Together, the result of these individual requests is a web page.

Sessions, pages, and objects

Web protocols have no direct concept of pages and sessions, so the system must use clues and rules to reassemble several objects into a page, and string pages into user sessions. To do these functions, the system looks at page composition, and tries to identify sessions, users, time-outs, and departures.

Sessions

A session is an identifiable period of interaction between a web user and one or more pages, whose duration is measured from the starting point of the interaction until either a certain amount of time passes since the user's last request or the user positively terminates the session (for example, via a logout action).

To identify a session, most applications insert a unique string into the communication with a visitor. This identification is usually done with a cookie, which keeps track of the user's interaction and associates requests with shopping carts and accounts. The system can monitor cookies, keeping track of a user’s session.

Users do not tell the system when they have left a site, so it must wait for a certain amount of inactivity before it can declare a session terminated. Similarly, for slow pages the system might want to force the ending of a page rather than wait for the remaining components to be delivered.

Pages

In web-based applications, the user's browser software sends HTTP requests to a web server. The web server responds with the pages, images, and other documents the browser requested. Each request and its corresponding response contain a great deal of information; Together, the result of these individual requests is a web page.

A page is a set of objects consisting of the container object (for example, *.asp and *.jsp) and its subordinate frames and objects. The reference URL of the subordinate frames and objects is that of the container object.

Objects

Some objects (index.html, for example) are containers that encompass a page's content and layout. Other objects (image.gif, style.css, script.js, for example) are components that are part of a page. Finally, some objects (document.pdf, file.zip, for example) stand alone; These objects are neither containers nor components.

Data collection and analysis

BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring separates traffic capture from data analysis and presentation. This separation allows the system to consolidate data from multiple locations, leading to the following benefits:

A single view of applications running in more than one data center
The ability to follow user sessions when they move to another data center
Comparison of application health and performance when served from multiple locations

A BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring system consists of at least one Real User Collector device supplying data to at least one Real User Analyzer device.

Real User Collector

Real User Collector devices capture traffic passing between your web applications and end users via a network tap or mirror port on a switch or load balancer. Traffic Inclusion and Exclusion Policies allow you to control what application data is captured. Using uploaded SSL keys, the Real User Collector device can decipher encrypted traffic. It can also obfuscate or delete private data. You can monitor the flow of traffic into the device via status information on its HOME tab and the TRAFFIC CAPTURE STATISTICS page.

Real User Analyzer

Real User Analyzer devices continuously retrieve data from one or more Real User Collector devices. You can control what data the Real User Analyzer device consumes from a given Real User Collector device by setting filters for each Collector feed. You can prioritize feeds so that the most important data is available to dashlets, reports, and other BMC Real End User Experience Monitoring monitoring features.

Watchpoints

The system passively monitors all the traffic to one or more web applications, which can result in an overwhelming amount of information.To make it easier to monitor only the parts of your web traffic that interest you, the system permits you to define precise segments of web traffic, known as Watchpoints, which you can monitor in detail. Below are some examples of traffic segments for which you can define Watchpoints:

Traffic to a particular web application
Traffic from a particular group of end users
Traffic from a particular geographic region
Traffic involving a particular part of your infrastructure
Traffic from a particular client platform

For each Watchpoint, the system aggregates traffic volume, availability, and performance statistics in five minute intervals. Performance is the measure of how well a server or application instance is functioning, as measured by metrics such as availability, page-render time, and throughput. Availability is a server’s ability to share its resources as intended.