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Holistic Unified User Experience Assurance

Gabriel Lowy

With the proliferation of composite applications for cloud and mobility, monitoring individual components of the application delivery chain is no longer an effective way to assure user experience. IT organizations must evolve toward a holistic, more collaborative methodology based on a service-delivery principle that is more aligned with corporate strategy.

The more business processes come to depend on multiple applications and the underlying infrastructure, the more susceptible they are to performance degradation. Unfortunately, most enterprises still monitor and manage user experience from traditional technology domain silos, such as server, network, application, operating system or security. As computing and processes continue to shift from legacy architecture, this approach only perpetuates an ineffective, costly and politically-charged environment.

Key drivers necessitating change include widespread adoption of virtualization technologies and associated virtual machine (VM) migration, cloud balancing between public, hybrid and private cloud environments, and the traffic explosion of latency-sensitive applications such as streaming video and voice-over-IP (VoIP).

The migration toward IaaS providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft underscore the need for holistic user experience assurance across multiple data centers, which are increasingly beyond the corporate firewall.

Moreover, as video joins VoIP as a primary traffic generator competing for bandwidth on enterprise networks, users and upper management will become increasingly intolerant of poor performance.

By having different tools for monitoring data, VoIP and video traffic, enterprise IT silos experience rising cost, complexity and mean time to repair. Traditionally, IT has used delay, jitter and packet loss as proxies for network performance. Legacy network performance management (NPM) tools were augmented with WAN optimization technology to accelerate traffic between data center and branch office user.

A more granular approach is to look at application payload and measuring the quality of voice and video communications. For unified communications (UC), this includes monitoring signaling between the UC components.

Meanwhile, conventional application performance management (APM) tools monitor performance of individual servers rather than across the application delivery chain – from the web front end through business logic processes to the database. While synthetic transactions provide a clearer view into user experience, they tend to add overhead. They also do not experience the same network latencies that are common to branch office networks since they originate in the same data center as the application server. Finally, being synthetic, they are not representative of “live” production transactions.

Service delivery must be unified across the different IT silos to enable visibility across all applications, services, locations and devices. Truly holistic end-to-end user experience assurance must also map resource and application dependencies. It needs to have a single view of all components that support a service.

In order to achieve this, data has to be assimilated from network service providers and cloud service providers in addition to data from within the enterprise. Correlation and analytics engines must include key performance indicators (KPIs) as guideposts to align with critical business processes.

Through a holistic approach, the level of granularity can also be adjusted to the person viewing the performance of the service or the network. For example, a business user’s requirements will differ from an operations manager, which in turn will be different from a network engineer.

A unified platform integrates full visibility from the network’s vantage point, which touches service and cloud providers, with packet-level transaction tracing granularity. The platform includes visualization for mapping resource interdependencies as well as real-time and historical data analytics capabilities.

Taking a holistic unified approach to user experience assurance enables IT to identify service degradation faster, and before the end user does. The result is improved ROI throughout the organization though reduced costs and higher productivity.

Optimizing performance of services and users also allows IT to evolve toward a process-oriented service delivery philosophy. In doing so, IT also aligns more closely with strategic initiatives of an increasingly data-driven enterprise. This is all the more important as big data swamps the enterprise. It is why I suggested in a recent article that user experience assurance should be big data job number one.

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Holistic Unified User Experience Assurance

Gabriel Lowy

With the proliferation of composite applications for cloud and mobility, monitoring individual components of the application delivery chain is no longer an effective way to assure user experience. IT organizations must evolve toward a holistic, more collaborative methodology based on a service-delivery principle that is more aligned with corporate strategy.

The more business processes come to depend on multiple applications and the underlying infrastructure, the more susceptible they are to performance degradation. Unfortunately, most enterprises still monitor and manage user experience from traditional technology domain silos, such as server, network, application, operating system or security. As computing and processes continue to shift from legacy architecture, this approach only perpetuates an ineffective, costly and politically-charged environment.

Key drivers necessitating change include widespread adoption of virtualization technologies and associated virtual machine (VM) migration, cloud balancing between public, hybrid and private cloud environments, and the traffic explosion of latency-sensitive applications such as streaming video and voice-over-IP (VoIP).

The migration toward IaaS providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft underscore the need for holistic user experience assurance across multiple data centers, which are increasingly beyond the corporate firewall.

Moreover, as video joins VoIP as a primary traffic generator competing for bandwidth on enterprise networks, users and upper management will become increasingly intolerant of poor performance.

By having different tools for monitoring data, VoIP and video traffic, enterprise IT silos experience rising cost, complexity and mean time to repair. Traditionally, IT has used delay, jitter and packet loss as proxies for network performance. Legacy network performance management (NPM) tools were augmented with WAN optimization technology to accelerate traffic between data center and branch office user.

A more granular approach is to look at application payload and measuring the quality of voice and video communications. For unified communications (UC), this includes monitoring signaling between the UC components.

Meanwhile, conventional application performance management (APM) tools monitor performance of individual servers rather than across the application delivery chain – from the web front end through business logic processes to the database. While synthetic transactions provide a clearer view into user experience, they tend to add overhead. They also do not experience the same network latencies that are common to branch office networks since they originate in the same data center as the application server. Finally, being synthetic, they are not representative of “live” production transactions.

Service delivery must be unified across the different IT silos to enable visibility across all applications, services, locations and devices. Truly holistic end-to-end user experience assurance must also map resource and application dependencies. It needs to have a single view of all components that support a service.

In order to achieve this, data has to be assimilated from network service providers and cloud service providers in addition to data from within the enterprise. Correlation and analytics engines must include key performance indicators (KPIs) as guideposts to align with critical business processes.

Through a holistic approach, the level of granularity can also be adjusted to the person viewing the performance of the service or the network. For example, a business user’s requirements will differ from an operations manager, which in turn will be different from a network engineer.

A unified platform integrates full visibility from the network’s vantage point, which touches service and cloud providers, with packet-level transaction tracing granularity. The platform includes visualization for mapping resource interdependencies as well as real-time and historical data analytics capabilities.

Taking a holistic unified approach to user experience assurance enables IT to identify service degradation faster, and before the end user does. The result is improved ROI throughout the organization though reduced costs and higher productivity.

Optimizing performance of services and users also allows IT to evolve toward a process-oriented service delivery philosophy. In doing so, IT also aligns more closely with strategic initiatives of an increasingly data-driven enterprise. This is all the more important as big data swamps the enterprise. It is why I suggested in a recent article that user experience assurance should be big data job number one.

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Despite the frustrations, every engineer we spoke with ultimately affirmed the value and power of OpenTelemetry. The "sucks" moments are often the flip side of its greatest strengths ... Part 2 of this blog covers the powerful advantages and breakthroughs — the "OTel Rocks" moments ...

OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

Enterprises are turning to AI-powered software platforms to make IT management more intelligent and ensure their systems and technology meet business needs for efficiency, lowers costs and innovation, according to new research from Information Services Group ...

The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

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Real privacy protection thanks to technology and processes is often portrayed as too hard and too costly to implement. So the most common strategy is to do as little as possible just to conform to formal requirements of current and incoming regulations. This is a missed opportunity ...

The expanding use of AI is driving enterprise interest in data operations (DataOps) to orchestrate data integration and processing and improve data quality and validity, according to a new report from Information Services Group (ISG) ...