1.1 How Experience Manager Works

Experience Manager measures and evaluates performance based on Service Views defined in Operations Center. The data that determines performance originates from:

1.1.1 Synthetic Testing

Synthetic testing simulates user transactions and transaction levels. For example, synthetic tests can simulate the steps taken by a user to view a Web page, send e‑mail, or use FTP to retrieve a file.

Experience Manager can run these simulations from diverse points inside and outside of a firewall. From each point, it can test any number of transactions for one or more users. For example, Figure 1-1 shows assets for a synthetic HTTP transaction and provides a detailed list of page component load times.

Figure 1-1 Alarm Properties Assets

1.1.2 End-User Response Times

Experience Manager monitors user response times by using server-side instrumentation to determine:

  • Completion time for a transaction

  • Differences between the actual and baseline response time

Experience Manager monitors Web-related actions such as page downloads, user logins, and completion of Web transactions without any modifications to the browser environment or agents on end users’ machines.

Use Experience Manager and Operations Center to compare and evaluate various metrics on a Web site or to compare response times for more than one Web page. Experience Manager records the metrics over time so you can chart graph performance over time in the Operations Center Performance view. For example, Figure 1-2 charts various response times for the Google Web site.

Figure 1-2 Performance View Chart