Monitor the actual user experience provided by your business applications and proactively detect application failures.

What is the actual experience of users of your business applications? What is the actual response time they get from SAP, Siebel or applications running on Citrix? How fast are transactions performed? Can you detect if a critical application is failing before it affects your business?

Visual Message Center 's new Universal Transaction Agent (UTA) helps you accurately respond to these questions by automatically reproducing typical user transactions, measuring the time it takes to complete them and detecting any possible malfunction. If transaction time is higher than expected, you can further investigate the related hardware and software components to detect and solve root-cause problems that ultimately affect user experience.

You can proactively detect application failures before they impact user experience and business results. For example, imagine a database is accessed by users only at the end of the day for a critical process. With Visual Message Center 's Universal Transaction Agent you can automatically simulate access before users actually need the application and discover if something is going wrong, with plenty of time to fix it. Without the Universal Transaction Agent the problem could not have been detected in time, resulting in a serious collapse of business.

The new Universal Transaction Agent works as a robot continuously testing your critical applications and transactions to discover problems and outages before your users or customers do, saving valuable time and money.

Monitoring user experience with synthetic recorded transactions

A transaction is a series of steps a user carries out in order to accomplish a particular task using an application. The Universal Transaction Agent can execute and monitor a typical transaction on any application that runs on Windows or can be controlled through a Windows interface, even if the application is actually running on another system and platform. This simulated operation is called a synthetic transaction.

Setting up a synthetic transaction is as easy as defining the system and application you want to monitor in the Universal Transaction Server, clicking on the record button and performing the sample transaction you want to monitor. Data can be retrieved from screens using cut and paste methods, which is great for extracting data from application screens and including this action in the overall synthetic transaction.

The Universal Transaction Server will create a script of the transaction you have recorded that can be played back at a regular interval, simulating final user experience, retrieving response time and availability metrics and feeding them into the Universal Transaction Agent, which in turn can generate an event in Visual Message Center 's SmartConsole.

• Windows native applications
• Web-based applications (including those using JavaScript, ActiveX controls, Flash controls, Java applets,Java Server-side, etc.)
  
• Java applications
  
• NET applications
  
• SAP R/3, Siebel CRM, and other major business applications
  
• DOS mode and character mode applications
  
• 3270 (Mainframe) applications through graphical and text-based emulators
  
• 5250 (OS/400, i5/OS) applications through graphical and text-based emulators
  
• UNIX/Linux applications accessed through a TELNET session
  
• Citrix Metaframe applications
  
• Microsoft Terminal Server
  
• And more

• Proactively detect application problems
• Manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
  
• Control end-user response time for critical business services
  
• Be alerted to problems before end users notice
  
• Discover service disruptions that are difficult to detect with normal monitoring methods (complex multi-tier, distributed applications, external services, etc.)
  
• Create credible SLA dashboards, reports, and suggestions for improvements
  
• Improve response times by obtaining actionable information about bottlenecks
  
• Easily extract KPIs from applications – right from the screens

Features

• Measures availability and end-to-end response time for practically any application
• Real-time alerts and escalation
  
• Editable, fully customizable transaction scripts
  
• User-friendly recorder (Wizard) to generate transaction scripts (no need to type a single line of code)
  
• Customizable reports to analyze trends, SLAs, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), Number of incidents, Availability (percentage and time)
  
• Real-time, color-coded, easy-to-understand, and customizable Web-based dashboards with status information (drill-down capability to get detailed data)
  
• Transactions can be divided in several logical steps to get a detailed, step-by-step response-time report to easily pinpoint the real bottlenecks
  
• Inclusion of dynamic data on scripts: dates, times, product codes, user id's, security codes, and more
  
• Ability to capture on-screen data (such as total sales, inventory levels and any other Key Performance Indicator) and use that data in the rules, events, and dashboards
  
• Ability to control transactions in several servers from one single location
  
• Ability to mix end-to-end data with the whole infrastructure model to rapidly discover the real root cause of failure(1)
• No need to use a dedicated PC(2)