BMC Synthetic End User Experience Monitoring overview

The Borland Silk Performer Synthetic Transaction Monitoring for BMC Software product monitors the performance and reliability of worldwide applications. The synthetic (also called robotic) transactions measure site health based on end-user experience metrics, such as availability, accuracy, and performance.

The product determines the health of business applications and measures their response time by running recorded transactions at key locations throughout the enterprise or on the internet. Response time is the time required to complete a transaction from the end user’s point of view. Response time is a key measurement of many customer service level agreements (SLAs).

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

Synthetic transaction scripts

Synthetic transaction monitoring uses prerecorded .ltz scripts to simulate end-user transactions, and BMC provides some basic scripts. You can create realistic and customizable scripts through an external scripting tool and upload the scripts to the BMC Application Performance Management Console. The scripts require a compatible runtime environment.

Deployment and management of the scripts is through the BMC Application Performance Management Console.

For more information about working with synthetic transaction scripts, see Managing-scripts.

Execution Plans

An Execution Plan provides the interface for a script and its execution. Through an Execution Plan, you specify the configuration for the script (including custom attributes), Agent Groups on which the script runs, run schedules, and blackout periods.

For more information about working with Execution Plans, see Managing Execution Plans.

Business Services

Business Services enable you to group together related sets of Execution Plans. Business Services provide a way for you to set up one general definition that can be applied to several Execution Plans. Every Execution Plan is associated with a Business Service, and every new Execution Plan inherits settings from the associated Business Service.

For more information about working with Business Services, see Managing-Business-Services.

Watchpoints

A Watchpoint is a configurable subset of synthetic execution response-time data, such as synthetic data defined by an Execution Plan or Business Service.

Use Watchpoints to filter the results from synthetic response-time data for monitoring, such as the following filters:

All synthetic transactions
A specific Agent Group
Results with availability errors, accuracy errors, or execution errors
An Execution Plan
A Business Service

For more information about working with Watchpoints, see Defining-and-managing-Watchpoints.

Integration with BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management

After you install the synthetic transaction monitoring components and configure Watchpoints for synthetic data, you can use BMC PATROL Knowledge Module for End User Experience Management to send Watchpoint data to BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management.

In BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, the following metrics are available for synthetic monitoring. Each metric is listed with its displayed units—milliseconds (ms) or number (#).

End to End Time Normalized (ms)
Host Time Normalized (ms)
Session Arrivals (#)
Error count (#)
Sessions Impacted (#)
Total requests (#)
End to End Time 95th Percentile (ms)
Host Time 95th Percentile (ms)
Watchpoint Enabled (#)

For more information, see BMC PATROL Knowledge Module for End User Experience Management.