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End-User Monitoring Architecture



Customer Success Story

Knoa EPM Drives User Performance Gains that are Nothing to Sneeze At

When Kimberly-Clark wanted to determine how well its end users were doing with its SAP solution, it selected Knoa Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) for its ability to identify end-user experience and performance issues quickly. "Knoa's EPM has enabled us to optimize the use of SAP in our Polaris project which affects 16,000 employees. The system gives us real insight that we have used to simultaneously improve the performance of the SAP application and improve end-user proficiency, while reducing support costs." said Bonnie Hillsberg, Team Leader, Kimberly-Clark Corporation. "Using Knoa EPM makes the difference between having a vague sense that there's room for improvement, and knowing exactly what is and isn't working. Knoa EPM shows us the 'who, what, when, where, why, and how' we need to know to optimize user performance - and reap the rewards."

Analyst Perspective

“The increasing interest in end-user experience monitoring is not surprising. It is almost tautological to say that a user's opinion of an IT-enabled service will be a function of his or her experience of that service. Without some way to measure the quality of that experience, IT operations management groups will be in the dark regarding the most fundamental dimension of the relationship with its business customer.”

Will Cappelli, Research Vice President, Gartner, Inc.
Knoa delivers the industry's first extensible platform for universal end-user experience and performance monitoring

Knoa’s Universal User Monitoring Platform signals the end of the need for a plethora of point monitoring solutions that our customers have struggled to deploy, integrate and manage to capture the requisite visibility of end-user experience and performance.

Knoa's universal end-user monitoring platform is comprised of the following elements:

  • A passive monitoring agent with the capability to collect any and all data about end-user experience, behavior and performance when using corporate software applications.
  • An expanded sensing technology to support targeted field-level monitoring for root cause analysis, security, and compliance monitoring.
  • A library of solution-specific templates that delineate the data collection targets for different applications to ensure that data collection and transmission remain efficient.
  • A data aggregation and modeling engine that transforms raw metrics into actionable insights. Decoupling data analysis and modeling from data presentation is the technology enabler to provide scalable analysis by application, role, business process and management objective.
  • A data presentation layer, the Knoa Performance Management Console, that can provide specific views of the aggregated data for specific stakeholder roles within the organization.
  • An extensible reporting framework which allows new report definitions to be created and deployed without any code changes or a need to upgrade the Performance Management Console.
  • An Open API framework to support out-of-box integration with relevant legacy system and application management products.

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Knoa EPM Architecture

Knoa Software builds a client/server technology platform that is an application-extension technology designed to sense user and application events at the GUI (graphic user interface) level.

With its client engine, Knoa tracks what the user sees and experiences on the live application, such as error messages (from any tier, including the desktop), response time for application operations, etc. Knoa technology resides outside of the target application as an independent monitoring system and does not require any changes to the application's source code or back-end infrastructure.

Once collected, the Knoa data is stored in a central repository where it can be analyzed to detect patterns and to generate Knoa's standard user and application performance metrics. This data is at the basis of the real-time display of user workflow through the application, real-time alerts, aggregate and trend performance reports, as well as management views of key performance indicators.

Knoa Client Engine and Monitoring Templates

In a standard deployment scenario, the Knoa client engine and monitoring templates are deployed on the target end-user stations (in a desktop environment) or a Terminal server (in a remote access environment). The Knoa client engine embeds Knoa's core sensing capability, and is a standard software component.

The Knoa monitoring templates contain instructions regarding which information needs to be monitored. They are custom developed for each target application and they are deployed on the end-user or terminal server station together with the Knoa engine. Knoa Software supports multiple delivery mechanisms, including centralized distribution or on-demand download.

Knoa Server for Data Collection and Analysis

The Knoa server components perform the main functions of data collection and data processing. The data generated by the Knoa client engine is sent to the Knoa server, which stores it in the Knoa database and performs additional processing if needed.

The Knoa server components responsible for the data collection as well as the analysis framework are standard, and are developed on the J2EE platform. The Knoa database is a standard relational database. Knoa Software supports a wide range of environments for its server deployment.

The Knoa server analysis solutions constitute the custom components of Knoa's analytics module - they instrument the data processing required by various performance metrics. Server analysis solutions can be configured for real-time or batch processing of data, depending on the reporting requirements.

Knoa EPM Console

The Knoa EPM Console is the standard interface for the Knoa performance metrics. It contains a wide range of reporting views and utilities for analyzing the performance data. It also contains modules dedicated to top-level performance management, summaries and aggregations of performance metrics and real-time displays of detailed user activities.

At the same time, Knoa data (both in its raw format and as processed data) can be easily integrated with external reporting tools or with external data sources.