by Michael Procopio
RUM or Real User Monitor is a tool to monitor actual user traffic running over your network.
Its part of our EUM or end user management suite. In the area of EUM there are two primary ways to monitor 1/ synthetic, which is covered by BPM or Business Process Monitor and 2/ real user monitoring.
Each has its place in a monitoring strategy. BPM is good for making sure things are up 24x7, even when no users are using your applications. Real user monitoring can give you information down to the specific user.
When I first moved over to BAC group and heard about RUM, I was impressed. One of the things it can do is replicate a users web session click by click. This allows someone troubleshooting a problem to see exactly what happened and what the error message was the user saw – no guessing. (sensitive data like passwords and credit cards are filtered out in memory before writing to a disk). Further, if you do find a problem it can turn the session into a script that can be passed to the QA team to replicate the problem, if they are using LoadRunner.
How does it work? It starts by capturing packets as they go over the network. This is done by a RUM Probe, which is software that runs on a dedicated piece of x86 hardware (typically). The Probe passes the relevant data to the RUM engine.
The RUM engine stores the data and key performance metrics are aggregated before being sent up to BAC for reporting and alerting. For example, an alert might be round trip time for the Savings Deposit transaction is taking too long. Here are some of the reports RUM provides:
- Global Statistics
- Page Summary
- Transaction Summary
- End User Summary
- End User Over Time
- Server Over Time
- Session Analyzer
- TCP Application Summary
- TCP Application Over Time
- Event Summary
- Business Process Distribution
Figure: Example RUM deployment configuration
Originally RUM strictly focused on HTTP/S traffic. But a while back support was expanded to due general tracking of TCP traffic, both streaming and non-streaming. In more recent releases additional upper level protocol analysis has been added. Beyond HTTP/S current support includes:
- XML/SOAP
- Siebel
- WebSphere
- MPLS
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Posted
10-07-2009 2:20 AM
by
Michael_Procopio