This article reviews the quantifiable business value achieved by customers of Riverbed Aternity End-User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) so that you can better understand potential savings in your environment. It summarizes the results of a 2019 third-party survey of Riverbed Aternity customers conducted by TechValidate, in which 54% of Riverbed Aternity customers reported a payback period of less than twelve months. This paper uses TechValidate survey results along with other third-party data to identify and quantify the specific areas of financial value driving these returns and is designed for IT leaders who are actively considering investment in end-user experience monitoring tools.
Companies are spending millions to transform their businesses in order to serve customers better, get to market faster, and compete more effectively. But to ensure these investments pay off, companies need to measure the human experience. They need a way of ensuring that digital transformation initiatives actually make things better. That’s where End-User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) comes in to play. Companies are investing in EUEM not only to ensure IT delivers a superior digital experience and to help identify and resolve issues quickly, but also to verify that digital transformation investments actually make things better. These market dynamics have led to increased demand for products such as Riverbed Aternity.
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Riverbed Aternity takes a unique approach to EUEM. Riverbed Aternity automatically monitors and correlates together the three streams of data that constitute true user experience—user interactions, device health and performance, and application performance, as seen by the end-user.
Riverbed Aternity monitors the performance of applications as they render on the screens of the user’s device. Further, Riverbed Aternity monitors the performance of business activities performed by the end-user. These are company-defined user interactions with applications in the context of a business process, such as “look up a patient record,” or “process a claim,” or “check inventory.”
Other EUEM products emulate, extrapolate, or simulate the end-user experience. Riverbed Aternity enables you to monitor the actual experience that users see as they interact with every application in their portfolio.
TechValidate surveyed more than 100 users of Riverbed Aternity, asking questions about the top product use cases and the results achieved. Analyzing the responses, together with data from other third party sources, shows that Riverbed Aternity delivers benefits in three key areas:
• Reducing service desk ticket volume
• Reducing MTTR
• Expanding use cases beyond Operations to app teams and business stakeholders
Without visibility into what users actually see when they use their applications, your Service Desk can only hope that IT is delivering an excellent user experience or wait for users to complain when it’s not. That’s no way to deliver an excellent digital experience.
Riverbed Aternity provides customers with the key capabilities that enable IT to identify and resolve issues proactively, remotely, and non-invasively.
Riverbed Aternity monitors user experience as applications render on the screen of the device. Riverbed Aternity does this for:
• ANY type of device: laptops, PCs, virtual desktops, or mobile devices
• ANY type of app: local, web, cloud, or mobile
When users report trouble, they don’t report it in technical terms. They don’t say, “I’m experiencing excessively high memory consumption.” Or “I have too many bad blocks on my hard drive.” They report trouble in business terms. Customer service reps will complain that it takes too long to pull up a customer record in the CRM application. Field service agents will report that it takes too long to submit a claim on their tablet when they’re out at the customer site.
Riverbed Aternity enables IT to monitor users’ interactions with applications in the context of business workflows like these by tracking every instance of every monitored business activity and automatically sets baselines for normal performance.
Because of the correlation described above, these baselines can vary by device type, office location, etc. This makes sense because a variety of factors affect normal performance. Response time in your headquarters building served by high speed data should be much faster than that in a remote home office with limited bandwidth.
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Riverbed Aternity automatically generates an alert when performance exceeds a baseline, or a manually established threshold, for multiple users of the same application. This enables IT to identify performance issues before users complain.
Riverbed Aternity triggers a service desk alert when the same application, hardware, or system problem occurs within a specified period of time. With these alerts, your Service Desk can take action before users generate trouble tickets. The bi-directional integration between Riverbed Aternity and ServiceNow is another way to get a jump on issues before they affect your users.
With Riverbed Aternity, IT can build a library of remediation actions, which can be executed automatically by the system, without the user calling the Service Desk for support. When recurring problems like hard drive failures, app or system crashes, low disk space, etc. occur several times on the same device within a certain timeframe, IT can specify the remediation action to be performed. At IT’s discretion, these actions can be run by the system with or without a notification to the end-user.
Application teams use Riverbed Aternity to optimize the performance of their apps, hold SaaS vendors accountable to SLAs based on what users see, monitor the performance of mobile apps, and to identify whether poor device performance is affecting app performance.
Unlike stand-alone DPM vendors, Riverbed Aternity has unified EUEM and Application Performance Monitoring (APM). With Riverbed Aternity, IT can monitor the end-user experience of ALL of the business-critical applications on which a user relies. Riverbed Aternity proactively notifies app teams of slow response problems. Then it shows the response time contributed by client device, network, and backend server. App teams can then drill down into Riverbed Aternity APM with a single click to investigate specific application transactions to isolate and resolve the problem.
IT and business leaders invest millions in IT projects to transform their businesses. Migration to Windows 10 can cost between $220 and $450 per user, according to analysts like Forrester6 and Gartner7 . Migrating to Office 365 can cost $150-$250 per mailbox8 . Without actually measuring the impact of these IT changes on end-user experience, IT and business leaders can only guess whether or not these investments are paying off.
Customers use Riverbed Aternity to validate the impact of IT change. Not just for device and OS changes, but also for strategic and tactical application changes, like migrations to cloud and mobile apps, or routine app upgrades. They use Riverbed Aternity to validate the impact of infrastructure changes, such as data center consolidation or WAN acceleration. This video shows how to validate change.
