Historically, the end user has not been a primary focus for IT operations. While this focus is starting to change, the user continues to be supported through the service desk and enabled through the management of the devices used. This level of support alone does not give the user the ability to solve IT problems independently or provide visibility into how these people use IT.

This situation is changing now because end users are beginning to play a major role in influencing IT decisions, especially regarding how IT applications are chosen, supplied, consumed and evaluated to support the business. Forward-thinking IT operations organizations are now using or investigating the use of management products that can provide greater visibility into how users consume IT.

It enables IT operations to understand how the end user is experiencing IT services, irrespective of how many applications are being used or where they are sourced. However, gaining visibility into end-user activity is valuable only if IT operations measure it against end-user satisfaction metrics.

By focusing on the end user, IT operations organizations can factor the business impact into IT service decisions and ensure that users are supported more effectively through visibility into their activity. Application performance monitoring solutions should ensure that there are no blind spots in how the business uses IT, and this visibility is leveraged to augment and enhance other key solutions.

IBM SmartCloud Monitoring - Application Insight is the next generation of application monitoring, purpose-built for public and hybrid clouds, which provides visibility into what matters the most - the end user experience.

IBM approach adopts a bottom-up, developer-focused approach that allows developers to directly embed monitoring technology into virtual machine images and then continue to use these technologies as additional workloads are initiated without deploying again.Designed for use in the development of web-based applications for public and private clouds, the IBM solution provides quantitative information on factors such as the application's response time or the end user's wait time. Using these insights, developers are better able to ensure both a product that meets user needs and a process that helps reduce or avoid the significant expense of repairing applications after they are in production.

IBM SmartCloud Monitoring - Application Insight allows users to drill through to detailed views of monitored applications, helping to highlight user experience data in the context of system resource data such as operating system, storage and network performance indicators. It manages application VMs using a multipurpose "fabric" node that offers distributed database, event monitoring, configuration and other management functions. This node is delivered as a VM, and can be deployed by a cloud tenant in the same way as an application VM.

IBM's SmartCloud Monitoring - Application Insight Ensures end user experience always meets their expectations

With this offering:

1. See what your users are experiencing
2. Identify problems before they affect SLAs (Real-User Monitoring)
3. Continuously validate production system performance
   - Captures performance and availability data of actual users for SLA reporting
   - Monitors network traffic for HTTP(S) requests to the web server
   - Completely non-invasive agentless monitoring
4. If you have a problem, find out about it before the customers complain

For more information on this new offering and to get that desired End-User Experience download the free trial IBM SmartCloud Monitoring - Application Insight Product Page

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