Business IT Buzz Blog

Hear Lori Wizdo, VP of Marketing for Knoa Software, an innovative new solutions enterprise experience management company, discuss the following with me:

• Some real-world examples explaining the ROI enterprises are receiving by shifting performance management to focus on end-user monitoring
• How end-user monitoring solutions allow organizations to feel secure in transitioning existing software applications into the cloud
• Three predictions in the end-user monitoring and management space (one of which has already come true!)

(Read Knoa's Nov. 4 announcement of their new end-user experience monitoring solution for virtualization, cloud, and SaaS right here.)

Listen to or download the 8:38 podcast below:

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Knoa Software is a solutions enterprise experience management company. Tell me a little bit more about the company and the benefits your solutions present for business initiatives?

Knoa Software provides end-user experience management solutions. What that means and we're trying to do is we focus on the end-users of corporate software systems that underpin and support most critical business initiatives. We monitor what's really happening as end users interact with these critical enterprise software applications that we're looking for and we're collecting information and generating metrics in two dimensions.

The first is information on the experience that the software is presenting to the end-user. So is it good quality or is it buggy? Are the transactions fast or slow? And then once we're sure that the applications are delivering a good experience to the end-users, we go on to measure how well the end-users are using those applications because that's really so often where things go awry. And so we're aiming to give our customers the information they need to ensure that the end-users are adopting the applications -- that they're using them efficiently, effectively, and productively -- because that's really the key to achieving business value and the return on investments the people expect when they deploy these enterprise applications like ERP, or CRM, or supply chain.

As enterprises shift performance management to focus on end-user monitoring, can you give me a real world example to explain the ROI enterprises are receiving?

Well, sure. Measuring performance from the perspective of the end-user, measuring application performance from the perspective of the end-user is really the only way to know if performance issues are impacting end-users and when they're not. And I know that sounds very -- like I'm stating the obvious, but there's a big problem or issue with traditional performance monitoring tools and the traditional approach which is still the predominant method in play today has been to monitor performance and resource utilization at each of the tiers of the backend infrastructure. So this approach assumes that if the execution of the application is not causing a resource constraint or delay at the database server, or the network server, or the application server, then the application must be performing well.

But the problem with this is that these backend focus performance monitoring approaches all too often result in conditions where everything is green on the backend, all systems are go, but then users are complaining that the application is slow or non-responsive. But just as frequently, a high-volume of alerts on the backend simply are false positives noise really, because the business of end-users are not being impacted. So both these problems highlight the reality that measuring application performance is experienced by the real users is a superior strategy.

So let me give you an example of a real-world benefits that Knoa customers are achieving. Our customers tell us that between 25% and 35% of all the performance problems that are reported by end-users are false alarms. The response times the end-users are experiencing are well within the SLA agreements. Our customers also say that they're able to verify that up to 60% of alerts generated on the backend monitoring technologies or systems are not creating any end-user issues. So with these facts about real end-user response times, these companies, our customers, are able to save hundreds of hours of time not chasing performance response time ghosts.

Right now in the IT space there's a lot of discussions about use of cloud computing technology. But what I'm hearing is IT leaders are often hesitant to make the shift when it comes to mission-critical software applications. How do end-user monitoring solutions allow organizations to feel secure into transitioning existing software applications to a cloud environment?

The IT leaders that I talk to are actually quite keen to extend economic benefits that virtualization offers to their tier one applications. But in many enterprises, these tier one applications, the ERP applications, the CRM applications are owned and supported by dedicated application teams that have historically had a great deal of influence and control over the environment that the applications run in. And these teams, the ones that support these applications, are rightly asking some really tough questions.

Most importantly, they are asking, "If we agree to let you virtualize our application, how are you going to guarantee us that the performance of our key transactions is not going to degrade?" So in order to resolve this deadlock between the application team, the application owners, and the IT operations group, there has to be some mechanism to measure the response time of key transactions within the application before the application is virtualized, and then to continue to measure them as various layers of the application are progressively moved from physical to virtual servers or migrated to the cloud. And that's exactly what end-user experience monitoring is designed to measure and track.

How will Knoa Software's particular solution for monitoring applications in the cloud allow enterprises to optimize existing technology?

Well, in early November, Knoa announced a new product specifically designed for end-user experience monitoring and applications that are being virtualized or delivered via the SaaS model or provisioned from the cloud. In these environments, it's really important that the measurement system not be affected by the change in the backend infrastructure, by the virtualization process, or by the migration to the cloud. In other words, it needs to remain a constant so that the data can be consistently compared across the physical and virtual implementations of the application system and that's just what the Knoa technology is designed to do.

Our end-user monitoring technology is based upon an agent that you install on the end-user's PC. The Knoa agent which is a passive software agent is able to collect really granular response time data on a per transaction, per user, per application basis. And the fact that this is done from the prospective of the end-user's PC, means that as the backend server tiers get progressively virtualized, the measurement point is unaffected by the process, and that ensures that the before and after data represent a realistic and unbiased comparison. And it's that unbiased comparison of before and after trending that gives the application owners the assurance they need to feel comfortable going ahead with having their critical applications virtualized.

Can you offer some predictions or trends that you're seeing in the end-user monitoring and management space?

What I need to note here that one of the predictions that Knoa made three to four years ago has come true. And three to four years ago, Knoa along with a few analyst firms was saying that by 2010 no performance management strategy would be complete unless it measured end-user experience and that has come to pass. All of the major management, application management vendors have added an end-user monitoring capability to their suites. But with few exceptions, these vendors offer an end-user monitoring solutions that captures a representation of end-user experience by measuring something on the backend and that something is presented as real end-user experience.

Most often is that something is deciphered from the HTTP traffic that is streaming through the network server. So our first prediction that end-user experience management would be part of an ATM strategy has come to fruition. Here's the next prediction, within two years, real will mean real. And Knoa believes, and again, we're backed by the analyst community on this, that the only place you can measure end-user experience is with the end-user, at the end-user's desktop or laptop.

The infrastructure provisioning options that we talked about today, cloud computing, and virtualization, and SaaS, certainly complicate measuring end-user response times. So do many things we didn't talk about, things in the application architectures that are prevalent today, Service Oriented Architectures, composite applications, Rich Internet Applications. All of these things really add to application complexity.

And you can make the case, and I frequently do, that with the complexity of the back-end infrastructure and the complexity of application architectures, the application doesn't even exist as an entity to be measured or monitored except at the point the end-user hits the enter key. And we think, Knoa believes, that it's just clear that the point of convergence, the point at which end-user performance needs to be measured, is at the end-user's desktop and you simply can't do it from anywhere else. So our next prediction is that solutions that effectively can measure cloud, composite, and virtualized applications must be performing and capturing from the end-user perspective. We believe this is where the source of innovation in the APM marketplace is going to come from, from this point forward. And that's why we are where we are.