Universal Simulation - An Introduction
As IT infrastructures evolve into business-critical systems, ensuring high availability and peak performance becomes critical. In such infrastructures, it is imperative to determine in real time when failures or slowdowns occur in thick client (non-web) or thin client (web) applications, and to accurately pinpoint which transactions are impacting the end-user experience. Speedy problem detection and precise diagnosis can significantly reduce application or service downtime and the resulting business impact on critical IT services.
Earlier, to record user accesses to thick client (non-web) applications, eG Enterprise integrated with a third party tool called Itexis AppsMon. Though this tool was very helpful, it required a lot of scripting and was not easy to customize according to the needs of the customer. Also, customers of eG Enterprise were required to purchase a separate license for Itexis AppsMon. This increased the operational cost of the monitored environment.
To reduce the cost incurred by eG's customers and to monitor the client applications with ease as well as to reduce the dependency of Itexis AppsMon, eG Enterprise has built a brand-new in-house tool called Universal Simulator (also known as "Full Session Simulator" ).
The Universal Simulator is a standalone desktop tool that is packaged with the eG agent and is installed on the computer / VM from where the simulation will happen. The Universal Simulator is used to simulate the required transactions and record the entire simulation to be played back at custom intervals later on. A specialized monitoring model named Universal Simulation has been built by the eG Enterprise to periodically play back the simulations and collect the required metrics.
By collecting availability and response time statistics for the complete service interaction and comparing the metrics with time-of-day, auto-generated or administrator-defined fixed thresholds, the eG universal simulator immediately alerts administrators during potential service outages or slowdowns.
By comparing the response times across each of the steps of a multi-step service access, administrators can detect the exact step(s) that could be causing user-visible slowdowns. Furthermore, using its patented auto-triage capability, the eG Enterprise is able to correlate the end-to-end service performance indicators provided by the eG universal simulator with critical indicators of network, system, and application availability, performance, and usage to pin-point where the root-cause of a slow-down lies. Customers can use the integrated solution to improve the quality of their service offerings, thereby enhancing their competitive positioning, lowering their operations costs, and optimizing the usage of their infrastructure.
Benefits of the Universal Simulator
- Supports simulation of both thick clients (Citrix WorkSpace App, SAP, etc.) and thin clients (VDI, virtual applications).
- A “black-box” approach for monitoring: Simulate end user access to a thick client / thin client application from different locations 24x7.
- Record and play back user actions (mouse-click, keystroke, etc.) for multi-step transactions.
- Provide instantaneous alerts on outages and slowdowns.
- Facilitate root-cause diagnosis and infrastructure optimization through correlation with other network, server, application performance indicators.
- Offers a reliable way of automating routine service health checks.
- Easy to use application.
- Multiple simulations from one endpoint are possible, but they should run sequentially and not in parallel.
