Introduction
As IT infrastructures evolve into being business-critical, high availability and peak performance of the IT infrastructure is becoming as critical as reliability is to a mobile network. In such infrastructures, it is imperative to determine in real-time when service/web application failures or slowdown problems occur, and to accurately pin-point which transaction(s) in the service access / web application access are impacting the end-user experience. Speedy problem detection and accurate diagnosis can reduce service / web application downtime and the consequent business impact of critical IT services.
eG's client session simulation and monitoring capability goes well beyond basic protocol-level up/down testing. IT administrators can record typical user accesses to mission-critical infrastructure services / web applications, and later have eG agents periodically playback the recorded accesses using the exact same client applications that users employ to access a service / web application. The eG client session simulator effectively simulates multi-step user interactions with a service / web application (e.g., login, browse, submit data, fill-in forms, etc.). For this purpose, eG Enterprise integrated with Itexis AppsMon for Windows which is a general purpose tool.
Using Itexis AppsMon for Windows to collect the availability and responsiveness of the target service / web application has its own limitation. The first and foremost limitation was that the tool was not HTML-aware. In modern times where transactions performed are mostly browser based, it becomes difficult to track the transaction availability and responsiveness with a tool that is not HTML-aware. Also, if eG integrates with Itexis AppsMon for Windows for monitoring, customers of eG Enterprise are required to purchase a separate license for Itexis AppsMon for Windows. This increased the operational cost of the monitored environment. To reduce the cost incurred by eG's customers and to monitor the web applications with ease, eG Enterprise has developed a purpose-built, in-house tool called Web App Simulator.
The Web App 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 Web App Simulator is used to simulate the required web transactions and record the entire simulation to be played back at custom intervals later on. A specialized monitoring model named Web App Simulation has been built by the eG Enterprise to periodically play back the simulations and collect the required metrics.
Benefits of the Web App Simulator
- Emulate real user interactions to Web site from multiple locations and record website availability and end-to-end response times;
- Identify which transaction(s) of a web application/web site interaction are causing slowdowns;
- Provide instantaneous alerts on service 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. Web App Simulator is independent of image recognition technique unlike Itexis AppsMon for Windows.
- Recorded simulation is independent of screen resolution. Administrators can record the simulation in a machine and play it on a different machine which has a different screen resolution.
