End User Experience Monitoring: I Bet Your Tool Can’t do THIS! Part 3
- By Mike Marks
- 27-Sep-2017
Hold cloud vendors accountable to application performance SLAs
Here’s how:
Three reasons your cloud vendor’s SLA won’t protect your business
Every service provider offers SLAs to their customers. These agreements typically contain goals for infrastructure availability, commitments for incident response time, and penalties. But these SLAs fall short for three reasons.
- SLAs stop at the cloud provider’s edge. Your cloud vendor’s SLA covers only the infrastructure under their direct control. Their SLAs cover only what they can monitor. A hosting provider’s SLA covers the data center infrastructure. A network service provider’s SLA covers the network. A SaaS vendor’s SLA covers application availability. So, what’s missing? Only the most important monitoring perspective—the end user’s perspective. Your cloud vendor’s SLA doesn’t extend to the point of IT consumption—the user’s device. Monitoring from the point of consumption is like drinking the perfect cup of coffee. Trust me. Grab a coffee and watch the video! You’ll understand this point immediately!
SLAs don’t include metrics that matter to the business. As discussed in a recent blog, SLAs based on business processes enable IT to communicate how well they support the business in terms that that are relevant to business leaders. Typical monitoring tools can’t provide these types of SLAs. Synthetic monitoring products don’t measure actual end user experience. They only emulate it. APM products relying on JavaScript injection may require tagging the code. Read more about the limitations of various End User Experience Monitoring approaches.- SLA Penalties are too little, too late. Sure, your provider’s SLAs addresses penalties for missed targets. But the penalty clauses relate to the aggregate performance over the whole month. Penalties paid at the end of the month don’t help your end user who is experiencing poor digital experience with a business critical app RIGHT NOW. You’ll receive your penalty payment long after you lose your customer due to a poor experience.
Establish application performance SLAs based on business processes
Unlike domain-specific monitoring products, Aternity End User Experience Monitoring enables IT to monitor users’ interactions with applications in the context of a business workflow. Aternity works for any type of application—local, cloud, web, or mobile. And it does not require tagging the code.
Aternity automatically sets baselines for normal performance of these activities. You can use these baselines to establish application performance SLA thresholds for each business process. Aternity will alert you if these thresholds are exceeded.
So, now you receive notification the instant your end users experience a problem with a cloud-delivered app. You can measure what matters—the user’s experience with applications, as they render on the screens of their devices. Armed with this information, you can hold your cloud vendor accountable to an application performance SLA that matters!
Get started with Aternity today!
Your choice of End User Experience Monitoring product plays a major role in determining whether your Digital Experience Management initiative will succeed. If your business depends on cloud-delivered apps, you need to hold your cloud vendor accountable. Whether it’s a hosting provider, SaaS vendor, or even IT outsourcer, Aternity End User Experience Monitoring can help you get this done. Read the Aternity Cloud Solution Brief to learn more.
Or even better, get instant access to Aternity in our cloud environment and explore this use case yourself! You can also review Riverbed’s Digital Experience Management solution page to learn more about our broader set of capabilities.