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.

An internal system error on ruei login screen

RUEI 6.5.1 is installed successfully without any error.
While trying to access RUEI url, login screen shows error as in following screenshot:

An internal system error is seen in /ruei/var/opt/ruei/processor/log/websensor*dbg file and this error is thrown even before showing login prompt screen.
Exception: An internal system error has occurred. Please contact the Administrator with the error details.
Code: 256
Stack trace: #0 /ruei/opt/ruei/gui/include/data/monitoring.inc.php(3566): uxQuery->Execute()
#1 /ruei/opt/ruei/gui/proxy.php(829): utGetNotificationProfile(1001)
#2 {main}

Action:
Verify the permission of $RUEI_DATA directory.
Ensure that 'apache' user has read permission for $RUEI_DATA directory so that it can read the oracle wallet.
%chmod 750 $RUEI_DATA

Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) - Moniforce

RUEI stands for Real User Experience Insight. RUEI can help organizations to understand the real end user experiences, identify issues and fix them before they cause losses.

RUEI works on Network Protocol Analysis (NPA) technology. It doesn't require any modification, changes or instrumentation in application. Because of it's passive monitoring approach, it's an ideal solution in production env.

RUEI is based on 3 layered architecture:
1. Data Collector
2. Data Processor
3. Data Presenter

1. Data collector
is responsible for collecting raw data and pass it as input to Data processor.  Data can be collected either via SPAN port or Network Tap.

2. Data Processor
is responsible for processing the raw data into proper OLAP datasets. It gets all URLs (webpages) and categorizes them based on application. These applications are defined and configured with RUEI.

3. Data Presenter
It's a J2EE based web application. That analyses and reports the data. Reports can be created on following criteria:
a. Time Period (year, month, week, day, hour, min)
b. client (country, provider, provider network, city, client IP)
c. server (IP address)
d. URL ( site, website, name, POST & GET arguments)
e. Page (application, group, page)
f. Customer name

RUEI 6.5 has been integrated with JVM Diagnostics(AD4J), Application Dependency and Performance (ADP/OCAMM) and Request Monitoring.