{"id":9692,"date":"2009-06-16T07:45:00","date_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9692"},"modified":"2009-06-16T07:45:00","modified_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","slug":"synthetic-transaction-monitoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9692","title":{"rendered":"Synthetic Transaction Monitoring"},"content":{"rendered":"

HP posted a blog entry<\/a> where they talk about a survey they did last year \u2013 probably with very large customers.\u00a0 They asked the companies if they used synthetic transaction monitoring.<\/p>\n

What the hell is that?\u00a0 The idea is that your monitoring solution can instruct an agent or agents to perform tasks against a business service to get a real world view of its health and performance.\u00a0 This user perspective gives you so much more than just testing the up\/down status of the web service or the SQL services.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a replacement for those monitors but it is a completion of the monitoring solution.<\/p>\n

According<\/a> to HP, \u201cabout half the respondents said they did. This ties in with a recent Aberdeen study that found 57% of companies didn’t do user experience monitoring<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

If you\u2019re using Microsoft System Center Operation Manager 2007 or 2007 R2 then you have the ability to do this out of the box<\/a> for your web applications.\u00a0 Not only that but you can also test TCP Ports and databases using OLE.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

OpsMgr includes a set of monitoring templates.\u00a0 Using a simple wizard you can very quickly capture a browser session<\/a>.\u00a0 You will then assign this new monitor to an agent or agents and define how often it will be run.\u00a0 This means that those agents will perform the web browsing session that you just captured.\u00a0 If the session fails or is too slow then there will be an alert.\u00a0 You can go on and build a distributed application using this new monitor.\u00a0 That can combine the health of web services, SQL services, network devices and the user perspective for the application you are monitoring.\u00a0 You can take this even further and use the new SLA monitoring pack to see if the application meets the availability requirements of your business or customers.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re feeling really adventurous then try this.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this solution we have a web service that provides an application to customers on the Internet.\u00a0 The monitoring solution is in the same site as the web service.\u00a0 How can you get a users perspective on that when you don\u2019t take the Internet into account?\u00a0 The solution is simple: lease a virtual hosted server from a service provider.\u00a0 Punch a hole through the firewalls to allow the encrypted agent traffic from the new hosted agent server to an OpsMgr management server.\u00a0 The agent will be certificate enabled so it can reside outside of the AD forest, i.e. in a workgroup.\u00a0 Now, if there is an Internet connection issue at the web server site you will get an alert from the agent.<\/p>\n

We use synthetic web transactions at work for our customers.\u00a0 We know immediately when there\u2019s an issue.\u00a0 In fact, we recently had an alert where a developer had made a mistake in a website.\u00a0 Without the alert, it\u2019s possible that this might have gone unnoticed by the hosting company for some time, thus losing customers.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Check out the solution and test it out.\u00a0 Once you\u2019re happy add it in to your alert subscriptions and you\u2019ll soon see how powerful this solution is.<\/p>\n

EDIT:1 <\/p>\n

I should have added something in here.\u00a0 What do you do if you’ve got no monitoring solution or if you’re in a (dedicated\/virtual server) hosting environment with no monitoring, or worse, monitoring you don’t trust.\u00a0 You can do something pretty similar to the above using an outsourced monitoring service<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

In this solution the owner of a hosted web service has subscribed to an outsourced monitoring solution.\u00a0 The OpsMgr server(s) perform normal agent monitoring using x.509 enabled agents or a OpsMgr Gateway on the hosted servers.\u00a0 That just requires the one TCP port to be opened outbound on the hosting firewall.\u00a0 The OpsMgr server also performs synthetic transactions against the web site(s).\u00a0 Optionally, the customer could just get synthetic transaction monitoring to verify that the hosting operator is living up to their contracted SLA requirements.\u00a0 You could even do this with a cheap\u2019n\u2019cheerful web hosting plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HP posted a blog entry where they talk about a survey they did last year \u2013 probably with very large customers.\u00a0 They asked the companies if they used synthetic transaction monitoring. What the hell is that?\u00a0 The idea is that your monitoring solution can instruct an agent or agents to perform tasks against a business … Continue reading “Synthetic Transaction Monitoring”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opsmgr"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}