How it Works

Agents

The key to understanding and managing frontline performance intelligence lies in the ability to measure what’s actually happening at the end user’s workstation. Aternity offers the only analytical performance platform that lives on the Frontline through Agents that reside on the users workstations. These Microsoft Certified Agents continuously collect application performance metrics for key business activities and transactions.

For example, within a customer relationship management (CRM) system, the Aternity Agents collect detailed performance information for activities such as “add new customer”, “lookup customer history” and “create billing record”. In addition, Aternity Agents uniquely inventory a snapshot of configuration and run-time attributes for each workstation, updating it automatically as changes occur.

When deployed, the Aternity Agents immediately begin measuring performance metrics and gathering environmental attributes including:

Business Activity Metrics – detailed activity log of applications and their functions actively used by frontline users; enabling path-of-action analysis and application training best practices; allowing for informed application development and performance
Key Performance Metrics – response time, latency, throughput and end-to-end execution time of any/all application-specific activities without scripting
Configuration and Run-time Attributes – hardware, operating system, networking, directory services, WMI, customer user-defined attributes and Aternity Agent status

In addition, the Aternity Agents deliver these critical metrics while only consuming a small portion of workstation resources:

Agents use less than 0.1% CPU on average and up to a maximum of 3.0% peak in the recommended configuration.
Agent network bandwidth usage is 1.2 Kbps during normal operation and up to 6.6 Kbps during peak.

Aggregation Services

The key performance metrics and environmental attributes collected by each Agent are securely transmitted to the Aggregation Services, where they are compiled with similar data from every other installed agent and captured in the Aternity database.

Aggregation Services remotely manage the interface to the Agents and provide the following primary services:

Gather status information about the Agents
Update Agent configurations, including activity definitions, and identifies disconnected Agents
Compile raw data from the Agents and transmits the aggregated data to the Management Services for analysis by Analytic Services

Analytic Services

Once the data is collected, the Analytic Services utilize state-of-the-art mathematical algorithms to build a comprehensive model of normal performance characteristics, or baselines, for homogeneous groups of end users. The Analytic Services automatically establish high and low performance thresholds for each group’s baseline. This mathematical model is then used to dynamically differentiate normal performance across departments and locations, independent of workstation environment, for any period of time (e.g., time of day, week or month).

For example, the CRM system’s normal response time for “add new customer” in Building 1 in Dallas is automatically recognized distinctly from the normal response times in other locations. When performance degrades, the Analytic Services automatically pinpoint what end users and applications are impacted and immediately identify the contextually relevant attributes common among the impacted end user workstations. This level of automation dramatically shortens both the time to detection and mean time to repair IT-related problems that impact business critical applications. Analytic Services deliver frontline performance intelligence, which is easily interpreted and acted on.

Key functions delivered by the Analytic Services include:

Automatic generation of normal behavior baselines
Dynamic creation of homogenous groups of frontline users experiencing the same performance, independent of location and configuration
Initiation of the preemptive problem detection process based on standard deviations from normal baselines
Rapid isolation of problems – workstation, network and/or application
Quick and accurate assessment of business impacts
Probable cause analysis

Management Services

Management Services unlock the value of the Aternity frontline performance intelligence platform by giving enterprises insight into what is wrong, who is affected and the unique commonalities of the affected end users; so problems can be easily understood and quickly resolved.

In the case of the CRM system, a trouble alert leads IT personnel to the interactive interface in Aternity’s Management Services showing that staffs in Dallas and New York are experiencing slow response times with “add new customer”. The management interface also indicates that all impacted staff workstations share a common secondary DNS server.

Aternity integrates easily with popular IT management solutions and third party reporting and data visualization tools:

Alerts may be sent via e-mail directly from the management services, integrated into popular ticketing systems such as Remedy, or via SNMP traps to third party management consoles.
Aternity’s open database schema allows for easy extraction of performance and environmental attributes data to third party management consoles, dashboards and reporting engines.

Management Services provide an intuitive user interface to the Aternity platform and include the following views:

Performance – multiple dynamic graphical views including baseline, problems and performance

Primary Analysis – information about current performance issues, event generation causes, affected groups and automatically generated sets of probable causes

Interactive Analysis – interactive review and analysis of the granular performance metrics and environmental attributes collected by the Agents

Administration – access to and creation of applications and activities managed by the Aternity platform; management of the status of all Agents from a single location