AppDynamics announced major enhancements to its End-User Monitoring capabilities as part of its new Winter ’16 Release.

The release introduces user sessions support for both Mobile and Browser Real-User Monitoring, providing a unified, seamless view of a user’s start-to-finish sequence of interactions, enabling enterprises to trace the digital user journey and correlate user actions — such as Web page views and mobile screen views — to application performance, conversion success, and other business metrics. Also part of the release is new Browser Synthetic Monitoring, now generally available, which enables proactive website monitoring to help ensure baseline performance and availability, establish competitive benchmarks, and monitor third-party content performance.

With these enhancements, enterprises now have a comprehensive, real-time view of end-user experience — fully integrated with the performance of the applications, databases and supporting services, all in a single pane of glass — as well as consistent benchmarking of performance independent of real-user load.

User sessions tracks and captures a user’s entire journey on a website or mobile app from the start until a configurable period of inactivity, or start-to-finish of a transaction sequence. Sessions can be viewed for individual users or a class of users. Sessions data is invaluable for understanding funnel dynamics, tracking conversion and bounce rates, and seeing where in the sequence users had issues or disengaged. Performance issues, health violations, and their causes are captured throughout a session, and the correlation with business impact can be captured especially in conjunction with AppDynamics Application Analytics.

“As companies embark on their digital transformation, it is absolutely critical to have an accurate, real-time view of every customer and their interactions with the applications,” said Kalyan Ramanathan, VP of Product Marketing for AppDynamics. “With user sessions, enterprises see in real time how their customers are proceeding through an entire transaction — whether it’s making a purchase, conducting a financial transaction, or navigating content — and the impacts of application performance on the success of that interaction become abundantly clear.”

The new AppDynamics user sessions capability provides the needed visibility with:

- End-to-end visualization of customer journey for both native mobile apps and websites, showing the sequence of user steps and the conversion funnel

- A single, integrated view of all the steps in a user session

- Identification of performance impact on funnel and conversion

- Issue identification and context to help streamline customer support

Also with the Winter ’16 Release, Browser Synthetic Monitoring moves out of beta and becomes generally available. It is a distributed, cloud-based, intelligent monitoring solution for programmatically monitoring website availability, functionality, and performance. It enables enterprises to proactively monitor and optimize their websites and Web applications from dozens of locations around the globe, using real web browsers, to proactively detect availability and performance issues so they can be solved before they impact actual users.

Built with the highly regarded, open-source WebPageTest technology, Browser Synthetic Monitoring eliminates the variability inherent in real-user monitoring, and provides accurate measurements for baselining performance, competitive benchmarking, and management of third-party content performance. In addition to reporting on availability, Browser Synthetic Monitoring can be scripted to measure a sequence of transactions simulating an actual user’s workflow, including entering forms data, log-in credentials, and actions to test and ensure application logic.

“Browser Synthetic Monitoring reports on browser performance in a consistent, rigorous fashion — without the variability inherent in real-user measurements, where you have different equipment, networks, etc.,” Ramanathan said. “And it’s the ideal way to benchmark competitors’ sites, to know whether you’re delivering the best experience for your customers, or if you have catching up to do.”

Because it is a cloud-based solution, enterprises can scale their synthetic monitoring up or down as needed, schedule measurement jobs flexibly anytime 24/7, and choose which of more than two dozen points of presence around the globe they want to measure and with which browsers. Measurements can also be set up to automatically re-test immediately on error, failure, or timeout to reduce or eliminate false positives for more intelligent alerting. There’s no need to wait for the next available window, by which time conditions may have changed. Browser Synthetic data can be viewed side-by-side with Browser and Mobile Real-User data in a single dashboard; Browser Synthetic Monitoring snapshots are also correlated with AppDynamics server-side APM for end-to-end traceability of issues.

“Browser Synthetic Monitoring is an indispensable tool for anyone running a website,” said Ian Withrow, Group Product Manager for AppDynamics End-User Monitoring. ”It’s the only real way to benchmark your competitors’ site performance. And it’s an accurate, consistent way to measure and manage third-party content performance to understand the impact third parties are having on your site, and to measure and manage performance for compliance with service-level agreements. Combined with our real-user monitoring solutions, it’s the most comprehensive picture you can get of performance at the point of interaction.”