How it works?

Lightweight, low-resource, Agents are installed on computers (laptops and PCs, with phones and tablets coming soon) where your users/customers are located, and are controlled centrally. They run invisibly, so that they can even be placed on real user/customer devices. The Agents don’t monitor or record what users do in any way – in fact, they completely ignore the user. Think of an Agent as a measurement instrument hosted by computer devices in offices and homes.

Agents make general performance measurements of networks and servers that host applications. They automatically transmit measurement data back to our Analytics Engine, which transforms general performance data into application-specific human experience using PQ algorithms (the research). Immediately, you will be able to quantify human experience and diagnose sources of impairment when they misbehave.

The Perception Agent exercises the network and server infrastructure by coordinating the use of standard command-line tools such as ping, traceroute and curl. From these tools (or equivalent operations), standard metrics (e.g. round-trip time, loss, goodput, etc.) are obtained and converted using a patent pending technique into Perceptual Quality scores. The technique uses complex mappings that reflect the impact of the metrics on a user's perception of application performance. The scores act as a reliable proxy for human voting.

There are a suite of parameters that can be used to adjust the coordination of the command line tools as well as to adjust the complex mappings used to produce the Perceptual Quality scores. For example, there are parameters that change the emphasis given to delay or loss metrics, or the degree of interactivity required by the application. These parameters are connected into the detailed workings of the complex mappings, and hence enable the proxy to be tuned to the needs of specific applications or user groups.

Benefits

Actual Experience Analytics currently provides actionable information to many different stakeholders in an organisation. The language of Perceptual Quality is easily understood by all, and enables stakeholders to communicate and make decisions about IT products and services that will have genuine economic impact. It enables non-technical business leaders to engage more meaningfully with IT decision-making. The language of PQ also enables a simplification of processes across teams that will help reduce cost as well as help a business become customer-centric in a more tangible way.

Actual Experience FAQs

1. What is Perception Quality (PQ)?
Perceptual Quality relates to the quality of a system in terms of perceived human experience.

2. Why is Perception Quality Important?
Perceptual Quality is the most important application performance metric because human perception has direct economic impact, affecting business process efficiency, staff morale, brand and customer loyalty.

3. What problem is Actual Experience solving exactly?
Today, companies are well instrumented and have lots of performance data, but find it very difficult to understand what impact IT infrastructure has on human perception. This leads to users being frustrated because helpdesks can’t see the problem, or engineers fixing things that won’t improve human perception, or business leaders not being able to quantify the real benefits of IT investment.

4. Why is understandin human experience so hard?
There is a complex relationship between human experience and application performance. In turn, applications are affected by network and server infrastructure in quite different application-specific ways.

5. What about Privacy?
The deployed Agents don’t monitor or record what users do in any way – in fact, they completely ignore the user. Think of an Agent as a measurement instrument hosted by computer devices in offices and homes.

Actual Experience bundle with Hyperglance

Actual Experience is also offered as a bundle with Hyperglance to enable organisations to have a full understanding on their physical and virtual IT infrastructures and the business impact of any events which may occur. These two products can be purchased separately, but together they are an extremely powerful combination.

Hyperglance from Real Status, is a 3D modelling and visualisation software that combines IT dependency mapping and data visualisation into one screen for thousands of devices. It enables CIOs and their teams to view all dimensions of inter-dependence between applications and infrastructure and combines this with performance and security metrics gathered from their existing management tools.

Users don’t experience servers, WANs, LANs, networks or data centres. They experience service, and when this is degraded, their productivity falls.  This new bundle allows providers of IT to really focus on the service delivered to their customers, ensuring that user satisfaction is maintained. Performance problems can be identified and removed before they manifest themselves in the form of service degradation.

By combining Actual Experience with Hyperglance, the end user experience analysis that Actual Experience delivers, can be combined with the “situational awareness” that Hyperglance provides by placing the sources of impairment in their network context. Correlation of data in this way will allow:

• Prioritisation of work on business critical devices where the impact of poor performance may be more widespread than just the specific service being monitored
• Faster service repair as correlation with reports from other areas of the network can be overlaid such as nearby data stores, firewalls and congested links
• Improved strategy planning, as inefficiencies in network design and routing can be identified in the positioning of users, impairments and servers providing the service

For more information on the bundle:

Click here to watch a short demo of Hyperglance and Actual Experience in action!

Click here to watch the Hyperglance and Actual Experience podcast!