HP End User Management software Enables real-time visibility into application performance and availability Solution brief
Figure 1 HP End User Management lets you proactively identify application performance problems before users are impacted Competitive pressures are forcing companies to evaluate and align the organizational structure to be sure the entire enterprise is focused on corporate goals and objectives. This shift is forcing IT organizations to approach business operation with an eye toward customer service, proactive management, and time-to resolution. As a result, enterprise IT organizations are changing strategy and focusing on the user experience while continuing to deliver traditional IT products and services. They recognize that simply managing individual system and network components is no longer enough providing an outstanding user experience, in addition to performing conventional system management, is the new gold standard for IT organizations. Many traditional IT monitoring tools fail to focus on total service availability, performance, and value from the user point of view. While the alerts received from these traditional, bottom up monitoring tools provide valuable information, they do not tell the whole story. IT organizations are not able to understand how these alerts affect users, application performance, value, or service. The need for clear visibility into the end-user experience including the ability to measure and monitor what users actually do is essential for IT organizations making the transition to a service oriented focus in order to provide the best possible user experience. Improve visibility and control end user s IT experience HP End User Management software combines industry-leading synthetic and real-user monitoring to give your technology organization a high degree of visibility into and control over the complete user experience. Designed to help align IT with business, the software provides comprehensive and integrated user monitoring. It provides real-time visibility into the user s quality of experience (QoE), combining real-user visibility with consistency and the proactive nature of synthetic monitoring. HP End User Management software offers complete coverage into your end user s experience, enabling your organization to rapidly isolate and quantify the scope of an application issue, gauge the customer and business impact, and thereby prioritize and respond appropriately. HP End User Management software lets you: Monitor the end user s experience proactively Assess the business impact when problems occur to prioritize IT s response Triage and isolate application problems Gain visibility into real-user behavior patterns 2
Increase collaboration between the various IT roles using consolidated and personalized application-based views Monitor applications deployed to a virtual or cloud environment How HP End User Management software works More effective coverage requires a balanced approach to end-user monitoring. Today, both synthetic and real-user monitoring play key roles in providing a better understanding of user behavior. Synthetic monitoring simulates business transactions against production applications at set intervals, providing consistent, predictable measurements even when real users are not accessing the application. Synthetic monitors can also identify problems when systems are idle and application administrators are not performing health checks. Real-user monitoring, on the other hand, measures performance and availability when real users are accessing the application. With the ability to measure every user regardless of location, real-user monitoring provides critical insight into the behavior of real users. This is particularly important as usage of common applications can vary dramatically. User data generated by real-user monitoring can be compared to baseline performance and availability data generated by synthetic monitoring to identify negative trends that need to be addressed before users are impacted. HP End User Management software consists of two integrated monitors, Business Process Monitor (synthetic monitoring) and Real User Monitor (real-user monitoring) to manage applications based on the user s experience. Application performance and availability information collected by these two monitors are viewed in combined reports and dashboards. Bringing together this information and dynamically linking it to the infrastructure, provides a comprehensive, actionable, and relevant context to all stakeholders. HP Business Process Monitor HP Business Process Monitor software lets your staff use synthetic transactions from multiple locations inside or outside your firewall to identify availability and performance issues before they affect customers. This lets you capture accurate, consistent, and repeatable performance and availability metrics to create a system baseline. Using this baseline, HP Business Process Monitor software identifies key variations and trends that let you plan capacity effectively and quantify the value of IT investments or changes. When problems arise, HP Business Process Monitor software lets you isolate them by location, server, application, module, and other factors for faster identification and resolution. The software provides a transaction breakdown by protocol to isolate the source of the problem. It also integrates with HP Diagnostics Software and HP TransactionVision allowing IT support teams to drill down quickly to the root cause of a problematic transaction. 3
HP Business Process Monitor software executes scripts that the Virtual User Generator software generates in production to create active transactions that simulate complex business processes against applications. It s similar to having real users access the application. When users interact with applications, their actions involve a set of requests that traverse technology components such as firewalls, switches, load balancers, Web servers, application servers, databases, and mainframes. These requests generate a response, which HP Business Process Monitor first validates for accuracy. The monitor then captures the response time and availability metrics. HP Business Process Monitor allows you to emulate even the most complex, multi-step transactions in almost any environment. As many customers already use the Virtual User Generator to create load testing scripts for HP LoadRunner software or HP Performance Center software, the scripts already exist in your quality assurance (QA) team. This lets you save time and effort creating end-user monitors. If it is important enough to test in pre-production, it should be just as important to monitor a business process in production. HP Real User Monitor HP Real User Monitor software lets you measure the true experience of your internal or external users. You can then gauge the business impact of performance issues and outages, and isolate user trends in detail. Using the software installed on a network probe, HP Real User Monitor software listens to every request and response sent over TCP/IP. It organizes the data by session for further analysis and increases collaboration between the monitoring and development teams. The software shows each navigation path and tracks the number of users. This usage information can improve capacity planning accuracy, and create quality and performance testing scenarios. For example: Application support teams can quickly identify and replay transactions to better understand user interaction with the application Development teams can replay to see specific application error codes and to determine what user action triggered the problem Customer service representatives can replay the user s session to assist in resolving the problem live Your IT staff can then further analyze data from user interactions to determine if users in specific locations are experiencing performance issues. This data defines the scope of issues and identifies affected end users. IT can collect application statistics for trend analysis to manage QoE, proactively intervene before issues become visible to end users, and avoid costly violations of service level agreements (SLAs). Broadest range of protocol support HP End User Management software leverages more than 12 years of experience in application testing, tuning, monitoring, and management to provide accurate emulation and measurement of end user business processes for Web and non-web environments, and packaged applications, including 4
Figure 2 Unified application level reports for faster results Oracle Siebel, SAP, Oracle PeopleSoft, Oracle Applications, Citrix, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and others. The software also supports multinational and multilingual environments. As multi-vendor IT infrastructures grow to include SOAs, composite applications, and complex technologies such as mobile applications, virtualization, and cloud, organizations are constantly challenged to pinpoint problem areas among an ever-increasing range of possibilities. In a virtual environment, your user experience should not suffer even as the virtual machines (VMs) move across the infrastructure; this is why it s important to monitor from the end user s perspective. You also need an application performance management solution that will monitor the entire end-to-end transactions of your application. It s not just about monitoring the virtual VMs, it s also about a complete coverage of VM health to application health and seeing this in one combined view. With end-user monitoring and a unified model in place, your organization can then draw on these tools in conjunction to automatically narrow down the scope of detected problems and allocate tickets to the proper domain group. Key component of HP Application Performance Management HP End User Management software is an integrated component of HP Application Performance Management software. Working with other products within the HP Application Performance solution can help your IT organization align its efforts with business priorities. By linking monitoring data with the HP Universal Configuration Management Database (CMDB) software, HP End User Management software helps your IT staff to quickly identify infrastructure-related root causes of end-user problems. The software can be deployed in-house using HP and partner services or through HP Software as a Service (SaaS). Key features and benefits: Prioritizes IT response based on customer and business impact Identifies application performance and availability issues proactively before they impact the customer Provides early warning and real-time alerts for application performance and availability issues Monitors the end-user experience of business applications, including those deployed to virtual and cloud environments Manages the customer s quality of experience 5
Enables drill down into HP infrastructure monitoring, application diagnostics, and transaction tracing capabilities to resolve problems more quickly Measures application performance and availability from outside your company s firewall and from multiple locations using HP Business Availability Center Anywhere SaaS offering FAQs Q: What is the benefit of using both synthetic and real-user monitors? A: Today, both synthetic and real-user monitoring play a key role in providing a better understanding of user behavior. Synthetic monitoring simulates business transactions to provide a consistent, predictable measurement regardless of whether or not real users are using the application. Real-user monitoring provides critical insight into real-user experience and behavior as usage of common applications can vary dramatically. Q: How does HP Real User Monitor software measure performance for different locations without deploying software or agents remotely? A: The software passively captures session data by connecting to a SPAN (or mirror) port or network tap. This approach allows HP Real User Monitor software to capture every packet on the network individually and reassemble, parse, and process every TCP/IP connection of interest individually for all users, from all locations, all the time. HP Services Get the most from your software investment HP provides high-quality software services that address all aspects of your software application lifecycle needs. With HP, you have access to standards-based, modular, multi-platform software coupled with global services and support. The wide range of HP service offerings from online self-solve support to proactive mission-critical services enables you to choose the services that best match your business needs. For an overview of HP software services, visit: www.managementsoftware.hp.com/service To access technical interactive support, visit Software Support Online: www.hp.com/managementsoftware/services To learn more about HP Software Customer Connection, a one-stop information and learning portal for software products and services, visit: www.hp.com/go/swcustomerconnection Service Management Services With Service Management, HP Services professionals help you optimize your people, processes, and technology to transform and continually improve the way your organization delivers IT services. To learn more, visit: www.hp.com/services/itsm HP Software as a Service (HP SaaS) can help speed your time to value and significantly lower your up-front costs. With ten years of experience assisting hundreds of customers, HP SaaS supports a phased approach and augments the expertise of your internal staff with our own expertise gained from years of experience working with organizations all over the globe. To learn more, visit: www.hp.com/go/saas HP BAC Anywhere is a service delivered by HP SaaS exclusively for customers with on-premise instance of HP Business Availability Center (BAC) Software. HP BAC Anywhere supplies 24X7 real-time visibility into cloud-based user s QoE and reports securely on metrics and alerts to the customer s HP BAC instance. To learn more, visit: https://portal.saas.hp.com/site/html/bacanywhere.mss 6
Q: Does HP End User Management software comply with industry regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), and Payment Card Industry (PCI)? A: Yes. First, all data collected is encrypted and protected at the collection, processing, and presentation layers. Sensitive data can be filtered out so it is not stored by the system. A complete solution Comprehensive training HP provides a comprehensive curriculum of HP Software and IT Service Management courses. These offerings provide the training you need to realize the full potential of your HP solutions, increase your network optimization and responsiveness, and achieve a better return on your IT investments. With more than 30 years experience meeting complex education challenges worldwide, HP knows training. This experience, coupled with unique insights into HP Software products, positions HP to deliver an outstanding training experience. For more information about these and other educational courses, visit: www.hp.com/learn HP Financial Services HP Financial Services provides innovative financing and financial asset management programs to help you cost-effectively acquire, manage, and ultimately retire your HP solutions. For more information on these services, contact your HP sales representative or visit: www.hp.com/go/hpfinancialservices To find an HP Software sales office or reseller near you, visit www.hp.com/go/apm 7
HP End User Management software offers complete coverage into your end-user experience, to learn more, visit: www.hp.com/go/apm Get connected www.hp.com/go/getconnected Get the insider view on tech trends, alerts, and HP solutions for better business outcomes Share with colleagues Copyright 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. 4AA1-5832ENW, Created June 2010