Addressing Key Cloud Performance Challenges

Solution Overview

Addressing Key Cloud Performance Challenges
- An Integrated Web and Mobile Monitoring Approach from Inside and
Outside the Firewall
Introduction

Fifty-nine percent of organizations that participated in TRAC's research reported lower than 50%
success rate in preventing application performance issues before users are impacted. Additionally, the
Web browser was found to be the top "blind spot" when monitoring application performance. As the
complexity of cloud environments and the ubiquity of mobile devices grow, organizations are realizing
that having full control over the quality of Web experience is becoming a more challenging task and
requires a new set of capabilities. The ability to effectively address these challenges can impact
customer satisfaction and revenue growth.

This Solution Overview report from TRAC Research examines how capabilities of Keynote Systems align
with the emerging trends in the Web experience monitoring market.

Market Context

Organizations that participated in TRAC's recent survey reported that, in order to have full visibility into
the quality of user experience, they need to be able to measure more than just averages around
application speed and availability. Today, organizations are looking at how application performance
directly impacts key business goals (Figure 1) and expect their user experience monitoring solutions to
provide information about how different types of delivery methods, Web browsers and devices are
impacting the quality of user experience.

TRAC's research revealed that the performance of Web APIs could impact revenues by as much as $400
million annually. Additionally, 49% of Web-based applications are dependent on data from other
applications. However, 43% of organizations are still not monitoring back-end Web APIs. As
organizations are increasingly depending on Web applications that are pulling data from other
applications and data sources, it becomes more important to have capabilities for measuring the
performance of Web APIs and Web Services in general. Performance of Web Services is increasingly
impacting some of the key business goals (Figure 1) and organizations are looking to expand their
application performance strategies to include visibility into the performance of Web APIs.

Solution Overview December 2011

Analyst Insight

Solution Overview

Figure 1: Top Business Areas Impacted by Issues with Performance of Web Services

Customer satisfaction 94%

Revenue growth 63%

Ability to communicate with partners 52%

Business agility 37%

Brand recognition 32%

Source: TRAC Research, March 2011

The research shows that 44% of organizations are deploying Agile methodology for software
development. The research also shows that the key challenge for application performance monitoring in
Agile environments is the inability to measure the impact of individual application release/upgrade
cycles on performance. The need to reduce the release cycle times for new applications, while ensuring
optimal levels of user experience, is one of the key drivers for organizations to focus their application
performance management efforts on both production and pre-production.

Figure 2: Top Factors Influencing Web Performance Management Strategies

3rd party content and services
71%

Increased amount of dynamic
content 69%

Streaming media
52%

Applications delivered to mobile
devices 47%

Variety of Web browsers used
32%

Source: TRAC Research, October 2010

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Analyst Insight

Solution Overview

As organizations are adopting Web applications that include rich user interfaces, the amount of
processing that takes place in a Web browser and on user devices is increasing, which drives the need
for moving points of application performance measurement out of the datacenter and gaining visibility
into the performance of Web and mobile browsers. Figure 2 shows that the quality of Web experience is
increasingly impacted by the performance of third party services and modules. Since the content and
interactions generated by these third party services are being processed directly within the Web
browser, organizations are finding it increasingly challenging to have full visibility into the quality of
user experience by solely measuring the performance of infrastructure elements (server, network, etc.).

Organizations that participated in TRAC's survey reported that the inability to prevent performance
issues before business users are impacted is one of the key challenges for managing application
performance. In order to address this challenge, organizations need to ensure, not only that they are
collecting data around key performance metrics of user experience monitoring, but also that they are
deploying solutions that include advanced alarming and diagnostic capabilities that would enable them
to be notified about potential problems before they impact the quality of user experience.

Additionally, organizations need to gain a deeper understanding of how changes in usage patterns for
Web applications and different types of Web content are impacting the quality of user experience. In
order to achieve this goal, they need to have the ability to rapidly correct performance problems by
testing Web application changes as issues arise. Organizations deploying applications for both Web and
mobile browsers are also looking to take an integrated approach for both monitoring and testing each
of these application types. Taking this approach allows organizations to make more educated decisions
about actions that they can take to proactively eliminate potential performance bottlenecks before they
impact their business goals. TRAC's research shows that organizations who are taking this type of
approach are 89% more likely to improve the success rate in proactively preventing performance issues,
as compared to their peers that do not have this capability.

The majority of organizations that participated in TRAC's research reported concerns that the
application performance monitoring solutions they are currently deploying will not be as effective when
used for monitoring cloud based applications. Additionally, these organizations reported that a lack of
SLA from cloud providers is one of the key reasons as to why they are not moving more of their
business critical applications to the cloud. In order to address these challenges, organizations need to
develop a monitoring approach that would allow them to gain more visibility into the quality of user
experience for cloud applications and, therefore, enable them to keep their cloud providers "honest".
Also, 74% of organizations that participated in TRAC's research reported that they are looking to
leverage a single solution for monitoring the performance of both cloud and on-premise managed
applications. In order to achieve that goal, organizations need to have capabilities for monitoring the
quality of user experience from both inside and outside the corporate firewall.

Figure 2 shows that managing performance of applications delivered to mobile devices is one of the
key areas that is impacting strategies for managing the quality of user experience.

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Analyst Insight

Solution Overview

As more users are accessing applications on their mobile devices, in order to have full visibility into the
quality of user experience, organizations need to have capabilities in place for monitoring the
application delivery chain for the mobile Web. Applying generic Web performance monitoring
capabilities for monitoring the performance of mobile Web can create additional blind spots for
application performance management and organizations need to ensure that their performance
management solutions include dedicated capabilities for monitoring user experience for mobile
applications. Taking a unified approach for monitoring user experience for both traditional and mobile
Web allows organizations to reduce the time needed for identifying and repairing performance issues
and optimize application performance across a wide spectrum of delivery methods.

Overview of Keynote Systems

Keynote's product portfolio includes capabilities for synthetic monitoring of Web performance from
outside of corporate firewall, mobile monitoring, Web load testing, and monitoring Web APIs, as well as
recently announced capabilities for monitoring Web performance from anywhere within an
organization's private network. This set of capabilities allows organizations to have coverage across key
areas of the digital value chain and enables them to not only measure the quality of user experience,
but also to collect actionable information that allows them to prevent and resolve performance issues.
This set of capabilities allows Keynote to provide visibility into the Web experience from the perspective
of end-users, while being able to measure the impact of a users' geographical location, type of network
connectivity (including mobile carrier), as well as the device where the applications are accessed. The
company also allows organizations to capture a wide range of metrics and data for the quality of user
experience that include, not only availability and speed of Web applications as measured from the end-
user's perspective, but also information about the impact of application load on the quality of user
experience, and the resulting business impact.

Keynote provides capabilities that are addressing some of the key performance management
challenges for both private and public cloud. Keynote's portable, on-demand solution for monitoring
any HTTP transaction, including Web Services and APIs, provides performance visibility at key points in
a cloud architecture. The company's global monitoring network and inside of firewall monitoring
capabilities allow organizations to take an approach for monitoring the performance of Web
applications that is agnostic of where applications are being hosted, either in the cloud or an on-
premise managed data center. This type of integrated approach allows organizations to reduce the time
that is being spent on correlating data about different aspects of application performance and, in
return, reduces time needed for addressing potential performance issues.

Additionally, Keynote's ability to monitor cloud performance goes beyond monitoring applications that
are hosted in the cloud. The company has developed dedicated capabilities for measuring the impact of
third party cloud services, which are delivered as components of Web applications, on the quality of
user experience. These capabilities span both services integrated within the browser, or directly
integrated with an application on the back-end. As more Web applications are becoming dependent on

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Analyst Insight

Solution Overview

the performance of Web APIs, Keynote enables organizations to measure the performance of these
connections and their overall impact on Web performance in general.

One of Keynote's core strengths is an integrated approach for monitoring the performance of Web
applications in production and pre-production. The company's offerings include capabilities for both
inside and outside of firewall monitoring in production, as well as Web load testing across a variety of
usage scenarios. Information about both of these aspects of Web performance is delivered to users in a
unified fashion, which allows them to improve their effectiveness in proactively addressing Web
performance issues.

Keynote’s product portfolio also includes dedicated capabilities for monitoring the performance of the
mobile Web and it allows organizations to take a unified approach for monitoring the quality of user
experience, regardless of the type of device that is being used for accessing applications. Having this
type of capability allows organizations to expand its view into user experience across different types of
devices and browsers and eliminates some of the key blind spots that organizations are experiencing
for Web experience monitoring. Additionally, in October of 2011 Keynote acquired Mobile Complete
(also known as DeviceAnywhere) which allows the company to enhance its capabilities for mobile
application testing and quality assurance across the mobile application lifecycle.

Summary and key takeaways

As organizations are increasingly using Web applications to support a variety of aspects of their
businesses, ensuring the quality of user experience for these applications is becoming even more
important. Expectations of website visitors and business users for the performance of these applications
are also increasing, while application designs and the application delivery chain are becoming more
complex. These trends are driving new market dynamics and creating opportunities for technology
vendors that have developed capabilities to cope with major challenges surrounding Web performance.
Keynote's offerings for monitoring the quality of user experience cover a wide range of use cases and
allow organizations to take an integrated approach for monitoring Web performance across desktop
browsers, mobile applications and cloud environments.

TRAC Research is a business-to-business (B2B) market research and analyst company that specializes in IT performance management. The
company’s research approach is based on four key attributes of true market research: Trusted, Relevant, Actionable and Credible. Our
mission is to facilitate open conversations between technology vendors and end-users centered around unbiased, primary market
research. Areas of coverage include: managing application performance over the WAN, application performance monitoring, Business
Service Management (BSM), network monitoring, end-user experience monitoring, application delivery, managed network services,
virtualization management, Cloud management and data center management. For more information about TRAC Research visit www.trac-
research.com.

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Addressing Key Cloud Performance Challenges

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