- How do we measure technology investments against improvements in end user productivity?
- How do we determine if our end users are truly experiencing the productivity gains we built our ROI models on?
- How do we determine if expensive ERP applications like Oracle or SAL are delivering the promised performance?
These are questions many of our customers have been asking over the last year, to which we have responded: "You have to measure the End User Experience and end user performance with each of your key applications."
While this sounds difficult and time consuming, Aternity fundamentally gave us the tools to answer these questions almost nine years ago and have kept evolving the platform ever since. (In full disclosure, Aternity is a product that we at Whitehat use to diagnose some of the most difficult technology challenges we face and that we sell to give our customers the tools to do this themselves).
If you are not familiar with Aternity’s capabilities, their software platform lets you do three very important things:
- Aternity gives us full visibility into exactly what end users experience, in real time, along with a correlation engine that lets us see problems coming (when performance gets worse than the established baseline, but before the end user creates a ticket) and make proactive moves to reestablish “normal” for our end users.
- Aternity lets us empower our lowest paid IT staff, the help desk, with a very simple way to see and interact with very sophisticated network traffic data and fix problems that would previously have taken several Tier 2 staff to identify and correct, lowering our internal support costs and lowering the cost we can sell support services for to our customers.
- Aternity lets us see inside any application and create custom measurement points that we use to gauge application performance and ultimately, what we consider the be the most important metric, end user productivity.
Up until April of last year, though, the magic of this application really ended with PC’s and laptops connected to the network right at the time when our customers were beginning to experience a revolution in the form of new wireless devices like smartphones and tablets.
While our customers were (and still are) wrestling with how to incorporate these types of devices, we were struggling with how to manage end user productivity and help our customers deliver a fantastic end user experience when we could not capture key metrics on these new devices.
Aternity responded with Aternity for Mobile that extended our ability to manage the End User Experience across their physical machines, VDI or virtual desktops, and finally mobile devices, including support for native, Software as a Service and mobile applications. Aternity for Mobile gave us the ability to capture most of the key metrics we were accustomed to and added additional metrics unique to mobile devices like signal strength.
Aternity would sum this up in four key benefits:*
- Provide the industry’s fastest instrumentation of native mobile applications including comprehensive monitoring of mobile device, network and service metrics
- Correlate device, network, application and service monitoring including storage, processes, CPU, memory and battery, Wi-Fi and cellular network and corporate network connection quality for core services
- Identify application crashes and system-wide error reporting, including stack trace
- Proactively detecting performance issues and identifying cause – by learning and analyzing behavior in real-time – empowering IT teams with rapid remediation of mobile application performance problems
If you are an Apple iOS customer, you can experience this first hand by
downloading Aternity’s free myUX application specifically for iOS devices. In this initial version you can see the quality of your UX (User Experience) on your iOS device summed up in a simple meter and you will see some of the factors that contribute to both a good user experience as well as what is going on when your user experience has gone sideways. Future versions of myUX freemium will incorporate additional connectivity and applications metrics, as well as historical and comparitive views.
Aternity uniquely measures the real End User Experience across all devices that gives us the ability to tie that experience back to productivity for the business. We like it so much we use it internally for our team and as a diagnostic tool, as mentioned previously.