End user impact is still the most important metric
Coradiant started out several years ago with a single clear message – that understanding the end user experience (whether actual human beings or back-office clients) was fundamental to managing any application. Since that time, the industry has evolved significantly, as it always does, leaving in its wake the broken remains of once-rising companies and rejected approaches. Often, as experience and depth-of-understanding increases, initial ideas are overthrown in favor of more accurate theories that reflect lessons learned in the field. Not so with end user experience. Not only has this idea won through unscathed, it has seen wide adoption at every level of the performance monitoring space. Analysts write about its importance and vendors of all sizes have integrated it into their solutions. There is not a single first-tier or second-tier vendor of APM solutions that has not built or acquired end-user monitoring technology and added it to their solution – e.g. CA, HP, Compuware and Quest all have an end-user component in their solutions. Companies in North America no longer doubt its value and expect to have such intelligence out-of-the-box. Europe is trailing behind this trend but I expect that they will rapidly catch up over the next two years.
The fact that end user experience has survived indicates that it is a fundamental truth of application monitoring – if you don’t understand how your user is being impacted by your application, you cannot effectively assess whether you have an actual problem. For example, if a primary database that has a backup goes down over a holiday weekend, should the IT manager agree to pay double overtime to have it fixed immediately? If, in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the failure, the IT manager presents the CTO with a purchase order for a clustered set of industrial servers with fibre-channel connections, should he agree to that very expensive purchase? These questions cannot be answered unless the impact of the problem is well understood and this impact must be expressed in terms of how it affected the end users of the business. No other metric is nearly as important. If few or no end users were affected, the expense of an emergency repair or a massive upgrade may not be truly justified. The days of watching CPU, RAM and disk usage as a means of determining real impact are over. Those metrics, although good to know and important in their own right, cannot effectively reflect the impact to the business the same way that user experience does.
The fact is that some truths never change.
