Thursday, August 23, 2012

EM12c: Synthetic Monitoring vs Real End User Monitoring

EM12c has Service Level Management features. Services can be managed via Synthetic Monitoring or via Real User Transaction Monitoring.

Synthetic User Experience Monitoring is achieved via Beacons based Service tests
  • It ensures the performance of specific business process or user
  • Can be used to determine location-specific performance problems by monitoring from multiple geographic locations
  • It ensures the performance of applications based on various supported protocols e.g. DNS, FTP, HTTP(s), Ping, ICMP Ping, IMAP, JDBC SQL Timing, LDAP, NNTP, Oracle SQL Timing, POP, Port Checker (includes SSL), SMTP, SOAP, TNS Ping, Web Transaction, WEBDAV, ATS transaction, CalDAV and Custom Script.
  • Beacons actively monitor the infrastructure.

Real User Experience Monitoring is achieved via RUEI (Real User Experience Insight)
  • It catches the performance problems for any user of HTTP applications
  • Catches unexpected performance issues or unique user interactions
  • Diagnoses problems quickly with “replay”
  • Determines exact usage of applications
  • RUEI passively monitors the end users.

Both monitoring techniques are complementary in nature, as synthetic monitoring will not execute real use cases (e.g. order process) or detect issues in a use-case it was not configured for, while RUEI monitors and detects issues when a specific use-case is executed by a user.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the advantages depends on what your job function is. If you only manage one application, synthetic monitoring is probably enough. If you're on the operations side of the house and managing multiple applications with heavy transaction volumes, real user monitoring would be best for you:
http://bit.ly/bwi4D0

Anonymous said...

i have couple of queries on REUI?
1.why is it called "passive monitoring" when you talk about REUI?
2.By passive if i assume that this mean something need to be enabled/turned on so as to monitor my selected web-user community sitting across a different geographic location hitting my target application (in my case a web application hosted for which i only have control over database tier)

Neelima Bawa said...

Sorry for the late reply. I was busy with Open World activities.
1. RUEI monitors the network traffic coming on app server that hosts the web app. It captures all network traffic and based on that data, one can see its reports.
2. RUEI doc can be found on http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E48389_01/index.htm
You would be required to setup the collector to monitor the webapp. You don't require to touch/manipulate application to monitor it.