User-Centric Proactive IT Management The Powered Rise by Frontline of the Performance Mobile Intelligence Workforce Aternity for SAP Gain Control of End User Experience with Aternity 1 P a g e Prepared by Aternity, Inc. 2013 Aternity, Inc. All other trademarks or trade names are properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents End User Experience Management from the Desktop Vantage Point... 4 Monitoring SAP Real End User Experience with Aternity... 4 Use Cases... 4 INCREASE APP ADOPTION & BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY... 5 PROACTIVE RESPONSE TO END USER APPLICATION ISSUES... 5 OPTIMIZATION OF APP PERFORMANCE TO PROTECT KEY TECH INVESTMENTS... 6 ENSURING HARDWARE EFFICIENCY TO ELIMINATE BUSINESS DISRUPTIONS... 6 HELP DESK OPTIMIZATION... 7 ENHANCING AND MAINTAINING A COMPETITIVE IT ENVIRONMENT... 8 ENSURING ROI FOR ALL CRITICAL APP INVESTMENTS... 9 About Aternity... 10 3 P a g e
End User Experience Management from the Desktop Vantage Point The driving need to understand real end user experience from the frontline has grown rapidly with the increasing complexity and highly distributed nature of today s virtualized IT environments. Cloud Computing, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Server Based Computing (i.e., Citrix Monitoring), SLA Management, and new product rollouts are just some of the main IT initiatives that have increasingly exposed organizations to the visibility gap and their inability to truly understand end user experience From the Edge on In. Widely adopted Application Performance Management (APM) technologies are data-center centric and are therefore limited in their ability to provide comprehensive visibility into how end users actually experience the business applications they consume. Aternity s Frontline Performance Intelligence (FPI) Platform uniquely monitors the three primary components that dynamically interact at all times to define and impact an end user s experience as an IT consumer: Application Performance, Device Performance, and User Productivity. Frontline Performance Intelligence is the result of the real-time aggregation, analysis and correlation of all these metrics, ultimately closing the visibility gap from the Desktop Vantage Point. Monitoring SAP Real End User Experience with Aternity With Aternity, organizations that use SAP benefit from user-centric proactive IT management through a 360 degree view of real end user experience, self-learning, proactive problem detection with probable cause analysis, and right-time decision support capabilities. Aternity s FPI Platform enables enterprises to get real-time, actionable business intelligence that eliminates performance and training gaps, delivering the value expected from their SAP investment. Specifically, SAP customers utilizing Aternity rapidly benefit from: Immediate awareness and rapid response to end user problems (before they call the help desk) through comprehensive visibility and proactive problem detection Dramatic reduction in business disruptions and MTTR as a result of real-time, advanced analytics Deep insight into application compliance and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as experienced by real end users Increased application adoption, user productivity, and business process optimization based on the precise insights into how users actually use SAP Understanding of how new technology rollouts impact end user productivity (e.g. upgrading to SAP ERP 6.0) The ability to ensure ROI on planned infrastructure investments due to production evidence that proves proposed changes substantially impact performance (or not) Use Cases Different stakeholders have different perspectives and challenges when it comes to monitoring and measuring end user experience, but they can all benefit from leveraging the Aternity FPI Platform. Here s how: 4 P a g e
INCREASE APP ADOPTION & BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY Business Unit owners are tasked with optimizing user productivity, application adoption and business processes by identifying and rapidly responding to application usage trends. In addition, enforcing workflow compliance and comparing the productivity levels of offshore users are also crucial to ensuring optimal performance and productivity levels of SAP-based applications. Those stakeholders will greatly benefit from Aternity s ability to report on usage and workflows and identify features or flows that are used very often or very rarely. Aternity s reports can also be used to identify users that require training, highlight QA and load testing areas that match real world usage. PROACTIVE RESPONSE TO END USER APPLICATION ISSUES Enterprises using SAP are usually multifaceted entities that need to operate smoothly around the clock and provide critical service. Monitoring their SAP-based applications is therefore key, and Enterprise Monitoring teams will greatly benefit from Aternity s ability to provide immediate awareness and rapid response to end user problems through comprehensive 360 degree visibility of real end user experience and proactive problem detection. Consider the following example a Fortune 500 organization must guarantee specific SAP application response times for proper operations. Using Aternity s advanced real-time analytics and correlation capabilities, Enterprise Monitoring teams can not only see deviations in SAP s application response across the entire enterprise, but are also preemptively notified about such deviations for immediate awareness, often even before end users are aware, and conduct probable cause analysis: 5 P a g e
OPTIMIZATION OF APP PERFORMANCE TO PROTECT KEY TECH INVESTMENTS Like other IT organizations, Application Support teams often need to remediate chronic SAP-based application performance problems. With Aternity, those teams have the ability to look into the entire SAP environment and gain deeper understanding of application slowness or crashes, and factors causing them or influencing them. Also, they can configure Aternity to send weekly performance and crash reports with top applications, top hosts and top DLLs, and analyze crash dumps. ENSURING HARDWARE EFFICIENCY TO ELIMINATE BUSINESS DISRUPTIONS End User Services teams are tasked with preemptive remediation of end user issues, and will greatly benefit from Aternity s ability to collect relevant data from the entire enterprise and point out brewing issues such as machines that are about to run out of disk space, servers that experience hard drive issues, desktops missing certain software modules etc. Non-Compliant Machines 6 P a g e
HELP DESK OPTIMIZATION Help Desk groups responsible for SAP often serve thousands of 24/7 end users (most not ITtrained) in multiple locations and using multiple applications. Triaging cases under such challenges is not trivial, and help desk teams are constantly optimizing their internal processes and technology to meet the ever-increasing demands. Using Aternity, those teams can gain critical real-time insight into each PC in the enterprise and collect its vital signs, without interrupting the user: Moreover, Aternity s data retention arms help desks with powerful historical triage capabilities that allow them to go back in time and validate past complaints and resolutions. Relevant reports, such as SAP availability by location or SAP problems by destination server, can be scheduled and sent to help desk managers promoting a more proactive approach. 7 P a g e
ENHANCING AND MAINTAINING A COMPETITIVE IT ENVIRONMENT System Architects are on a constant mission to implement new solutions for ever-increasing demands. With Aternity s ability to collect and analyze SAP application flows from the entire organization and correlate them with overall load and environmental attributes such as location, subnet, office etc., as well as with desktop attributes such as virtualization, CPU, memory and OS, architects can validate performance impact and usage of new features: 8 P a g e
Moreover, as organizations are shifting to desktop virtualization, Aternity can assist architects compare performance between virtualized and physical workstations and measure performance and usage of work-from-home users: ENSURING ROI FOR ALL CRITICAL APP INVESTMENTS Finally, from the CFO perspective, ensuring ROI on IT investments and maintaining costs are critical for the ongoing success of the organization. Aternity s real user monitoring can be used to reveal the actual usage of licensed SAP applications and optimize licensing across the enterprise. Aternity also enables Informed Capacity Planning based on empirical evidence that validates how load on Citrix XenApp and VDI environments impacts user performance and productivity. CFOs can compare this information against financial data to accurately determine ROI and feasibility. 9 P a g e
About Aternity Aternity redefines real end user experience management by delivering the industry s first Frontline Performance Intelligence (FPI) Platform, effectively transforming every device mobile, virtual, and physical into a self-monitoring platform that is user experience aware. By arming organizations with user-centric, proactive IT management capabilities, the Aternity FPI Platform dramatically reduces business disruption and increases user productivity. With Aternity s 360 degree view of end user experience, advanced analytics for preemptive problem detection and cause analysis, and right-time decision support capabilities, Global 1000 enterprises finally have the empirical evidence on how application performance and usage impacts business results, providing them with a path for constant improvement. Aternity has received prestigious industry recognition from the American Business Awards, the International Business Awards, Best in Biz Awards, The Boston Business Journal, The Marker and NetworkWorld Magazine. The company was recently positioned by Gartner in the 2011 Visionary Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and was recognized in Enterprise Management Associates 2012 Cloud Application Performance Management (APM) Radar Report as the top vendor providing an APM point solution earning EMA s Value Leader distinction, while also being recognized as an APM elite vendor providing the market s Most Comprehensive Endpoint Diagnostics. To further evaluate how Aternity can bring winning performance to your frontline and to find out if you qualify for a free evaluation and proof of concept, visit www.aternity.com. EndUserExperience2Day, sponsored by Aternity, is a freely available, award-winning news and blog portal that can be accessed at www.enduserexperience.info. Follow Aternity on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook, recommend us on LinkedIn, join us on Google+, and see us on YouTube. 10 P a g e