Next Generation of Performance Management

Operations teams have long used this information to tune their websites and correct web performance issues. But collaborating with developers on problems impacting user experience was more difficult.

Now operations teams can monitor website, measure, and parse page performance in a way that offers a far more telling picture of user experience–information that’s both actionable to developers, and of concern to business owners.

To give business owners this insight, Keynote in Transaction Perspective 11 leverages Navigation Timing to measure distinct phases of User Experience:

Time to First Paint: When the user sees something happening on the screen; the site has begun to render in response to their request. This critical first step tells the user that the site is responding to their action.

Time to Full Screen: When most users would perceive their browser space is filled above the fold; rendering may still be happening out of sight, but from the user’s perspective, they’re looking at a full page.

User Experience Time: The total elapsed time the page took to complete. The browser is done with the page and is now waiting for and responding to additional user input. This is analogous to the standard page load time or user time; it can also be used to measure a complete multi-page transaction.

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Potential Opportunity For SaaS Solutions

It is a truism that many of us tech-savvy types (myself included) often forget that many people and organizations are not downloading major releases of an application the week they are released for a variety of reasons: potential security concerns regarding the application, cost of the application, comfort level, or even the cost in man-hours of the work involved in a free upgrade. For many people in the workplace, their best performing applications are often running on their home machine.

That is not a trivial issue in a world where SaaS solutions are being evaluated. After all, in the cloud, the browser can be the weakest link in your web  performance chain, and IE6 wasn’t designed with SaaS in mind, which could put off potential cloud customers.

Read more, also take a glimpse at SaaS service provider solutions to monitor website.

Web monitoring from end users perspective

• Adopt the user’s perspective

For a truly accurate picture of how a user experiences your site, you need to monitor  web site performance wherever users are across the globe. Monitoring the performance of your Web site solely from within your enterprise will never provide a true picture of how your users experience the site. A user’s experience depends on a complex system of interconnecting Internet communications – third-party advertising and content providers, content distribution networks, and much more—and all of those elements lie beyond your company’s firewall. Differences in access speeds and networking technologies can result in significant differences in user experiences. The only way to capture how users experience a transaction is to monitor website and transaction performance from where they live.

• Monitor the entire transaction

Even simple transactions, such as submitting a request for product support, can involve clicking through two or three pages. And each page might perform a number of transactions, such as dynamically loading content or images. Knowing that a transaction failed somewhere in the process is not good enough. You need end-to-end details so you can pinpoint problems and repair them quickly.

• Reduce complexity

Managing a Web site with multiple transactions is difficult enough. The solution that monitors those transactions should simplify IT tasks, not make them more complex. You need to be able to get up and running fast and have intuitive, straight-forward ways to monitor transactions on an ongoing basis.

• Instill credibility

Transaction monitoring solution must be accurate and credible. You have to be able to rely on the monitoring solution to help you determine whether a problem exists, where it exists, and whether you should spend valuable time and money to fix it. You need to know that measurements are due to real problems, not due to a fault or variability in the web monitoring solution itself.

Transaction monitoring services adopt the user’s perspective and provide broad-based measurements from representative, stable locations outside of organizations. They offer an end-to-end view of online transactions to identify potential problems anywhere in the process. These services are also easy to use so that administrators can concentrate on fixing problems. And they are accurate, credible services that
organizations can count on.

Source: http://www.keynote.com/docs/whitepapers/MonitorOnlineTx.pdf