SmartBear Software announced new AlertSite UXM to help application development teams focus on delivering superior customer experiences.

Software teams are under increased pressure to deliver applications that provide a superior user experience while also shortening the time between development and deployment. In addition, Gartner has stated, “By 2014, 75% of the Fortune 1000 will offer public Web APIs.” (Gartner Research Document: Predicts 2014: Application Development, Brian Prentice, David Mitchell Smith, Andy Kyte, Nathan Wilson, Gordon Van Huizen, Van L. Baker - November 19, 2013) These APIs provide another point of potential user experience problems. Finally, when user experience issues do occur, determining why critical applications fail to perform as required can be a time consuming and expensive proposition.

AlertSite UXM is the first rapid time to value, easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use platform that unifies load testing, synthetic and real transaction monitoring in a single platform delivered as either a SaaS or on premise offering. AlertSite UXM provides complete monitoring and transaction tracing capabilities, not just for applications, but also APIs to assist in rapid root cause analysis. Pre-deployment load testing can also be performed to ensure application performance. As a single platform, AlertSite UXM unifies the most critical application and API management capabilities with best-of-breed code-level diagnostics. As a result, development, QA as well as operations and business teams can all work from the same data, efficiently share their insights and closely collaborate to reduce the time to find and resolve issues while also moving the organization closer to a continuous delivery software model.

AlertSite UXM is composed of three new modules:

- AlertSite UXM Synthetic – measures simulated users and includes easy-to-use and deploy transaction tracing based on innovative technology acquired from APM vendor Lucierna

- AlertSite UXM Real – measures actual user transactions down to code level root cause analysis

- AlertSite UXM Load – highly scalable load test service to validate application performance from the user’s point of view

“AlertSite’s availability and performance monitoring has helped us effectively respond to product issues when they occur by providing detailed alerts as well as robust data and charting to help isolate issues from a user experience perspective,” said Hal Manuel, Senior Director, Content & Technical Operations at Questia, Cengage Learning. “The addition of AlertSite UXM Synthetic can transform this user experience monitoring. Previously, we could understand basic user experience information. Now with AlertSite UXM Synthetic, we will be able to trace and find performance problems down to the code level details where product issues can be easily diagnosed and fixed in short order.”

Jonah Kowall, Research Vice President of IT Operations at Gartner, and Will Cappelli, Research Vice President of Enterprise Management at Gartner, note, “The demand and importance placed on APM tools has increased significantly during the past several years, and will continue as applications and infrastructures become more complex, dynamic, and additional layers of abstraction are introduced (for example, virtualization, SDN and API abstraction).” (Gartner Research Document: Gartner Hype Cycle for Real-Time Infrastructure – Application Performance Monitoring, Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli, July 2013)

“SmartBear sits at the intersection of development, testing and operations teams,” said Rich Caplow, SVP Product Commercialization at SmartBear. “Bringing together the APM technology from our Lucierna acquisition with our testing and monitoring technology creates a unified industry-leading platform that allows our customers to easily and dramatically improve their delivery of a more effective end user experience and to enable continuous software delivery.”

AlertSite UXM Synthetic with complete transaction tracing is currently available. AlertSite UXM Real and AlertSite UXM Load will be available later in Q3.