Aternity Frontline Performance Intelligence Platform for Desktop Virtualization

Aternity turns every PC – whether real or virtual – into a self-monitoring platform that is end user experience aware, arming enterprises with comprehensive Frontline Performance Intelligence, and the ability to automatically detect, isolate and pinpoint probable causes of end user problems. By going well beyond monitoring the overall health of end user workstations and business critical applications, to understanding the productivity of people and organizations on the frontline, the Aternity platform empowers business and IT executives with precise information how frontline users’ experiences impact business results, giving them a path to constant business improvement.

The Aternity Platform can be deployed on a single server supporting deployments of up to 5,000 End Points, and is comprised of Microsoft-Certified Agents, Aggregation Services, Analytic Services, and Management Services.  This service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables the Aggregation and Analytic Services to be decoupled from the Management Services, and scale to support tens of thousands of End Points. 

Aternity FPI Agent: Deciphering Real End User Experience 

Click image to enlarge

Measure application, desktop, and productivity performance metrics with the Aternity Agent for Frontline Performance Intelligence.

The Aternity Agent for Frontline Performance Intelligence is extensible via its “plug-in” architecture. These plug-ins or cartridges enable the Agent to monitor all aspects of end user experience. System-related plug-ins include hardware and software inventory, Registry, Process and WMI. Using the vbScript plug-in, any available attribute, such as NIC settings of different Ethernet adapters can be monitored. Application-related cartridges enable instrumentation of any application independent of the underlying technology. Application cartridges include Network, Web (HTTPs), HTML/Javascript, Client/Server (Win 32 Windowing API & Messaging Loop), COM, .NET, Java, Citrix (ICA) and Terminal Server (RDP). Using a combination of any/all of the above cartridges, the latency, response time, and end-to-end execution of any business process can be monitored, e.g. "logon,"  "order item" or "add new customer", “execute trade”, etc. 

In virtualized environments traditional metrics like CPU and memory utilization become marginal indicators of performance, and hence the real need for visibility into actual end user experience.  Legacy system management solutions that rely on measuring OS operational parameters, SNMP traps and exposed Windows Management Instrumentation counters will be blind to the fact that the machine is a guest of a virtualization host; these metrics are at best not representative or at worst even provide misleading information. Similarly, network and virtual appliances that monitor the network traffic between the virtual machines and the back-end network would be blind to user experience slowdowns resulting from resource contention within the guest machines. Even though the combination of factors that affect the service performance offered to the user do include the memory, CPU, and IO bandwidth available to the virtual machine, the monitoring of each on the guest platform will not provide insight into the likely performance the user will experience.

Through multi-layer monitoring of the user experience in the network, middleware and Windows message loop levels, the Aternity platform provides a unified metric that is directly tied and representative of the virtualized applications service level. A common example is a CPU spike in one of the machines hosted on a physical server, where a CPU monitor installed on another machine wouldn’t show any slowness while in fact the unified user experience metric would show that due to lack of CPU resources, the activity performed by the user is taking longer to execute.