02. 12. 2013 NetEye Blog Admin Real User Experience

Al´exa: the potential of a young project

The traditional monitoring systems are measuring only the performance of single IT components, but not the reliability and availability of the IT services from the end user perspective. The classical methods of control, even if the entire infrastructure seems to work properly, are not able to guarantee the service performances as they are perceived by the users. To satisfy the expectations of the users a new approach is needed to extend the horizontal measurement to a vertical view in the term of end-to-end monitoring. There are already different Application Monitoring approaches also in the Open Source field that are trying to meet these expectations. However, in most of the cases these systems can only test web applications but are not able to monitor from the end user view also those applications published via terminal server / Citrix or to control mainframes, that in most of the cases represent business critical services for the companies. Nowadays IT organizations should, therefore, adopt systems able to monitor the availability, reliability and performances of the services from the user point of view and not only based on the data center perspective.

The Al´exa project beginning

These were the main necessities which brought the Al’exa project to life. It has been designed an engine able perform almost all user interactions with different applications – as the input with a keyboard, mouse click, text, image or application objects recognition. Al’exa simulates the user behavior by interacting with the applications and by recording the time needed for each action to be performed. The solution has also been developed in a flexible way so that a change in the application (i.e. object position, color or size) does not require any test case modification.

The Al’exa architecture

The potential

Even if Al `exa is a young project, it was immediately recognized the potential of the solution in the monitoring of applications such as SAP or Java services published via Citrix / Terminal Server. A test case of medium complexity has a minimum cost of one to two man days, complex test cases can take longer till 5 days to be completed. The implemented test cases can later be executed continuously 24×7 by helping the IT department to immediately identify possible application performance or availability problems and prevent the complaints by the users, also for those cloud/outsourcing service that in many cases need to respect service level agreements. In this context, Al’exa can also be adopted to determine if an outsourcing partner is compliant with the performance SLAs. The same logic can also be applied for all those applications published via Citrix, in fact, the same test cases can be used also to check the availability of the services in those situation where they are delivered to the users through the adoption of terminal servers. The IT department can, therefore, assure that the applications are reliable and available even if they are accesses by Citrix.

An intelligent user interaction simulation, that can be located where the user operates.

The overview

The experience shows that the best ideas always born based on concrete needs. It is to be hoped that also in the future Al’exa can be further developed by the Community, that can share test examples or the development of new designs for the expansion of the project. A continuous improvement is possible in this direction thanks to the Community contribution to cover even more complex scenarios and to meet for example also those monitoring requirements of the Qaulity Assurance such as regression tests and test scalability.