1. Slow Cool, Ain’t Cool
Hon Wong
Symphoniq Corporation

2. Agenda
• Ajax Web 2.0 apps…
new opportunities
new performance management challenges
• Real user approach needed
• New approach in action
• Q&A
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 2

3. The Evolving Web
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 3

4. All In The Name of the End User
“The Next Big
Killer App / Feature”
Rich Internet Ubiquitous Computing
Applications (RIA) and Access
Brittle Architectures Loosely Coupled Dynamic Architectures
Architectures
Rigid Taxonomies “Semantic Web”
Loose Folksonomies
Web as Information Web as Information
Source Web as Information Synthesis
Collaboration
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 4

5. Challenges of the Rich User Experience
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6. Dealing with the Challenge
Web App DB
Traditional tools & techniques generate External App
oceans of data – no solutions
• Log file analysis
• HTTP watch
• Network sniffers
• Load testers
• Server monitors
• Monitoring services
• Many more…
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 6

7. Reality Check
“43% of all application outages aren’t
detected by the tools put in place to
manage them, but by the end-users who
are subjected to them”
Dennis Drogseth, VP, Enterprise Management Associates
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 7

8. And Even if A Problem is Discovered…
While most problems get solved in less than a day,
30% of problems take more than a day to solve.
18.00%
16.00%
14.00%
12.00%
10.00%
8.00%
6.00%
4.00%
2.00%
0.00%
<1 hour 1-2 2-4 5-10 10-24 1-2 days 2-5 days > 5 days
hours hours hours hours
Forrester Research
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 8

9. Performance Management: Practical Question #1
“Living is a form of not being sure, not
knowing what next or how…We guess. We
may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in
the dark.”
Agnes de Mille
When user satisfaction has direct business
impact, do you have the luxury of blindly
assuming users are satisfied with application
performance?
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 9

10. Performance Management: Practical Question #2
quot;I'm an ocean, because I'm really deep.
If you search deep enough you can find
rare exotic treasures.“
Christina Aguilera
When business happens in Web time, do you have
time to search oceans of performance data to pin-
point the cause of slowdowns?
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 10

11. Performance Management: Practical Question #3
“Strive for continuous
improvement, instead of
perfection.”
Kim Collins
When complexity and high-speed change
make perfection unattainable, do you have the
actionable information required to drive
performance improvements?
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 11

12. Holistic Approach to Performance Management
Real User Monitoring Web App Performance Service Level Assurance
Web App DB
• How can I avoid being • Why is my application • What is the impact of
blind-sided by slow? performance problems
performance issues? • Which tier is causing the on the business?
• Which users are being slowdown? • How do I link
affected? • Is it inside or outside the performance criteria to
• How can I troubleshoot data center? specific business units?
specific user issues? • How can I recreate or
validate problems?
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 12

13. Bottom Line Impact of “Do Nothing”
Time and resources consumed Distraction from core
Trying to isolate problem business
Wasted IT
Employee
Blame game budget
Reduced
downtime triage
productivity
Brand damage Slow = Off
Customer Lost revenue
abandonment
Inadequate tools
Blindsided by Incomplete
transactions
to detect and
diagnose
performance problems
issues Compromise
strategic
Wasted Resources initiatives
Costs 10x to fix the
problem in production
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 13

14. Why Monitor from the Real User Perspective?
Calculating end user response time is not practical…
RT ≈ (Payload / Bandwidth) + (AppTurns * RTT) + Cs + Cc
RT Response time of the transaction in seconds
The amount of information (bytes) that must be delivered to the user
Payload
Minimal bandwidth across all network links between the user and the
Bandwidth data center
Number of user and web site interactions needed to generate a user-level
AppTurns system response to a transaction
Round-trip-time (in seconds) between the user and the data center
RTT
Total processing time required by the data center consisting of web
Cs servers, application servers and database servers
Cc Total processing time required by the user’s PC
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 14

15. How Real-Time Apps Derail RT Calculations
Parameter Limitations
• Varies greatly transaction to transaction
Payload • 3rd party or cached content
• Non-page content like AJAX, Flash
• Varies greatly from user to user
Bandwidth • Varies from moment to moment
• Varies greatly transaction to transaction
AppTurns • 3rd party or cached content
• Non-page content like AJAX, Flash
RTT • Varies from moment to moment
• Varies from transaction to transaction
Cs • Dynamic data center—what “path” will the transaction take?
• Difficult to instrument applications, esp. 3rd party code
• Varies from user to user, moment to moment
Cc • Impacted by “last mile” conditions
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 15

16. Methods of Measuring RT
RT derived through
Measuring RT directly
i
measurement of
at the browser
surrogate parameters
Measuring RT by
“listening-in” and
listening-in”
not adding load Empirical Direct
Installed Agent
Passive Sniffer or
Dynamic Injection
Active Synthetic Monitoring (not applicable)
Measuring RT of
artificially created
transactions
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 16

17. Direct Measurement at Browser – Only Viable Approach
for Ajax Apps
• JavaScript that delivers Ajax features are executed
on the client’s machine
• Non-page content
• Last mile connectivity impacts end user experience
- Chatty protocol
- 3rd party content delivery network
- Client side caching
• Mash-up, SaaS & 3rd party content mask
performance issues
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 17

18. Installed vs. Dynamic Injection Approaches
Download monitoring agent to PCs
Installed Agent
Installed Agent Dynamic Agent
• Download monitoring agent to PC • Inject instrumentation
onto page via Web server
• Measure RT, errors & desktop
or App Delivery Controller
perfmon statistics
• Non-intrusive
• Challenges:
– No agent download
– Convince users to download
– No source code changes
– Maintain agents
– Potential compatibility issues • Measure RT & errors
• Only suitable for PCs under IT’s • Applicable to all customer-facing
direct control or enterprise applications
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 18

19. Beyond Monitoring – End-to-End Management
HTML, AJAX, Flash,
Silverlight Web App DB
Tier Time Detail External App
Web
App
SaaS
DB
Ext 1 Management
Server + DB
Ext 2
Total
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 19

20. Meaningful, Correlated & Actionable Data
RT (as experienced by the end-user)
Everything measured from
Affected Party’s IP Address and URL
the real user’s perspective
Network Latency
Parsing Time
Objects Per Page
Object Response Time
Error or Abort Rate Correlated across all tiers of
Base Page Response Time network & infrastructure
Response Time at Web, Application & Database
Tier
Server Responsible at Each Tier
Server Parameters: CPU utilization, Memory, I/O
etc.
Web Service Calls
Method Call Tree Insight into application
SQL Queries
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 20

21. Real Time, End User Experience Driven Problem
Resolution
Detect Problem Based on RT
Assess Impact
Prioritize Issues
Outside Inside
Outside or Inside?
Client or Network? Front or Back End?
Client Network Front End Back End
Identify Identify Which Page, Which Object
Individual User Individual IP Object, Web and Server?
Service, Server?
Trace Call Stack
Method Call or
Solve The Problem
SQL Query?
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 21

22. Performance Measurement Based on Real Users
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23. Quick Triage
• Directly relate real user RT to IT issues
― Not impacted by infrastructure configuration
― Accommodate 3rd party content, SOA etc.
• Focus resources on fixing the problem instead of
reproducing the problem or pointing fingers
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 23

24. Tuning Web App. Performance Using Real Data
Requirements Optimize
Design
Operate
Build Deploy
Development Phase Production Phase
Discover & fix performance bottle-
necks under load prior to rollout
Real-time detection & mitigation
of performance issues
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 24

25. Requirements of a Comprehensive Tool
Detect Isolate Optimize
Web App DB
• Provides visibility into • Isolate problems by • Report on business
browser-level tagging and tracing impact of performance
performance, including transactions through problems
RIAs internal and 3rd party • Optimize application
• Detect performance J2EE and .NET services performance with
problems in real time to • Visibility into problem historical trending and
minimize impact servers, services, analysis
method calls and SQL
queries
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 25

26. Complexity Creates a Spectrum of User Experiences
HTML
AJAX Web App DB
Flash,
Silverlight
External App
# of Occurrence
Response Time
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 26

27. How to Report App. Perf. to Business Owners
One approach: Application Performance Index (Apdex)
• Standardized method for reporting app. perf. as defined
by an alliance of companies and users (www.apdex.org)
• Reduced myriad of perf. metrics into a 0-to-1 scale (0=no
user satisfied, 1=all users satisfied)
Num. Satisfied Users + ½ Num. Tolerating Users
APDEXT =
Total Num. Users
=4T
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28. Aligning App Perf to Business Goals
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29. Sample Apdex Report
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30. Contact Information
THANK YOU!
Hon Wong
Symphoniq Corporation, Palo Alto, CA
Tel: (650) 213-8889
e-mail: hon@symphoniq.com
Web: www.symphoniq.com
© 2008 Symphoniq Corporation 30