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.