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Introduction
In a recent article by Peter Goldin, End-User Monitoring: Looking at IT Performance Through Your Customers' Eyes, monitoring industry marketing guru Tony Barbagallo pointed out that "...Organizations can often tell you the fan speed of a server, but not whether or not a customer can log into the system!" This pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

In terms of understanding the motivation to adopt Application Monitoring -- which goes way beyond simple hardware checks -- in YOUR organization, here is our take on the issues you may encounter:

• Just What IS Application Monitoring? Who needs it?
  
  • Application Monitoring is an advanced type of full-reality simulation of user interactions designed to let you know if something really serious is wrong with the e-business aspects of your web presence.
  • You need it if your business depends on customers or users being able to complete transactions on your web enabled application. That's everybody, yes?
• Why Do You Want To Know These Things? Why is Knowing What Is Going On Important?
  
  • Company revenue could be affected -- big money could be involved! Failures can cost a LOT!
  • Customers will complain and maybe NEVER come back to your website.
  • Why should YOU be the last to hear about a problem.
  • Even worse, do you want your CUSTOMERS to let you know you've got an issue?
• What Should You Know?
  
  • Not simple things like, "Is the power on" and "Are pages being served?"
  • Instead, the big stuff, like whether your e-business system is running OK, can customers log in, can buyers purchase something.
• When Should You Know It?
  
  • For the trivial stuff, NOT in the middle of the night via a pager. That would be a waste.
  • For the serious stuff, RIGHT NOW!
• From Whose Perspective Should Monitoring Be Done?
  
  • As if a real user, over the "last mile", were using your website.
• How Should I Do This?
  
  • If you can, do your Application Monitoring from the most realistic perspective that you can.
  • eValid is a universal browser based test engine. It can test anything you can do on your website -- and do it automatically.
• How Complicated Is This To Do?
  
  • Setting up a "deep transaction" application monitoring test with eValid is pretty much as simple as opening the eValid browser, making a recording, and then checking the script into your monitoring system. It's a piece of cake. And we guarantee results.
• Is It Scalable? Is It Reliable? What Do I Have To Have To Run It?
  
  • Yes, it is. For each machine you figure on up to 3,000 full-reality tests daily. That's about ten different tests, each running every 5 minutes. You'll never be more than 5 minutes away from realistic failure notification.
  • eValid is very reliable. At July 2007 our estimate is that worldwide eValid usage accounts for over 2,000,000 tests per month.
  • eValid monitoring runs on regular Windows PCs, with NT/2000/XP/Vista. eValid's footprint is about that of the IE Browser.
• Aren't There Free Solutions?
  
  • Sure, there are lots of free or very low cost solutions, but mostly they don't tell you much about what's really important: whether your application is really working?
  • Consider a medical analogy. If you go to a doctor, the first thing he asks you is, "How are you feeling?" and a lot of his diagnosis depends on what you say.
  • The free or very low cost solutions don't do that. By analogy, they take your temperature or maybe even take your pulse. But they don't attempt to carry on a real conversation.
• To Do It Right, What's It Going To Cost Me?
  
  • Not nearly as much as doing it wrong.
  • Do the math on the back of an envelope: At $1 Million in sales per day; being off the air for 1 hour will cost you $41.6K in lost revenue. That's $695 per minute! You really can't afford NOT to monitor real activity.
• So, Why Do This With A Browser?
  
  • In a word, if you want an automated process to act like a real user, and your real users communicate through a browser, then you really have just one choice: test with the eValid instrumented browser.
  • eValid, being actually an IE-equivalent full-featured browser does the job perfectly.
  • Check out our technology writeup: Why Browsers?