When we returned from the Christmas break we were excited to
find a new present under the Data Center team's tree. It was an Internet appliance
from Coradiant which provides real-time user and application performance
monitoring and analysis. We were sold on the device after the first on-site
demo. Once the device is installed it analyzes and summarizes the millions of
transactions that flow to / from our Data Center and the end users of
Fellowship One. It does so without any performance degradation as it is simply "sniffing"
the network traffic as it flows by. Some of the major reasons for our decision to
purchase the device were:
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Coradiant has done an excellent job of
pre-configuring the most common reports, queries, dashboards, and charts
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It is highly configurable so we can report upon
any number of custom attributes such as churchcode, userid, application, pagename,
etc. with little or no new programming required
-
Its plug-n-play architecture allows us to
install the device and begin reporting on the data within just a few hours
-
It can securely decrypt and report upon SSL
traffic without any performance impact
-
It can report upon the path the user took
through the application; This is extremely useful in determining the root cause
of application errors and user behaviors
-
By matching tokens between the web requests it
can calculate the network speed from the end user's computer to / from our Data
Center; This is invaluable information when we are troubleshooting reports of
slow performance
As you might surmise the device is useful to not just our
Data Center team but also to our Customer Support and Product Development teams as
well. Once fully configured the Customer Support team can leverage Coradiant's
performance analytics when assisting customers. It will give us an
unprecedented amount of detail on the user experience, from the pages that they
accessed and in what order to the actual performance and network latency the
user is experiencing from their computer. And our Product Development team can
compare and contrast page performance statistics looking for hotspots where there
are a high number of errors or subpar performance.
The installation and configuration of the device in our data
center is scheduled for mid-January, we hope to be fully leveraging the device by
early March 2008. It's exciting to have this new tool in our toolbelt as we
strive to improve the end user experience.
- FT Data Center Team