Monitoring actual end-user interaction is important to determine if your applications are available 24x7 and if their responses are quick enough. As businesses expand at a global level, it becomes all the more important to measure customer experience from different geographical locations.

ManageEngine Applications Manager's Real Browser Monitor records web transactions using a toolbar. These transactions are then played back at regular time intervals from multiple locations. It proactively monitors the availability, response times and page loading time of web transactions. Real Browser gives high visibility to the synthetic web transactions and helps you enhance your customer experience.

For example, if you have different users logging in to your application from UK, US, Germany, Australia, etc. you can monitor their experience from a central Applications Manager Server. You can have the Applications Manager running in a data center in India and have the Real Browser Monitor Agents deployed in other geographical locations and have it report Web Application Performance data to the central site. This way you can monitor the availability and performance of the website pages at different locations.

Benefits

• Monitor performance and availability of applications from multiple locations
• Record and playback user sessions for easy troubleshooting and improve customer experience

Note: RBM supports Internet Explorer Browser only

Working of Real Browser Monitor

• Components of RBM - Toolbar for Browser (Internet Explorer), Agent to be installed from where the "Internet Explorer" playback has to be performed and Applications Manager Server.
• RBM Agents have to be installed on a dedicated Windows Machine - 256 MB RAM, 1 GB HD, with Internet Explorer 6 or above. However, Applications Manager can be installed on Windows or Linux. This works with the Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition (with Managed Server).
• Using the RBM Toolbar you can record the required URL Sequences and the actions that a typical end-user would access. The actions will be recorded as webscripts.
• Real Browser monitor is created in Applications Manager server by calling the required webscripts and agents. RBM Agent will run the webscript associated, by invoking Internet Explorer. The recorded actions will be replayed in the browser. Once the playback is complete, RBM Agent will update the results of the playback [response time, response code, etc.] in Applications Manager.
• The availability and response time of the recorded URLs will be monitored according to the poll interval set. Alarms are configured based on threshold configurations. So, if the health of the URLs is critical, alarms will be generated.
• Some of the performance metrics that are monitored - Average Response Time, Current Response time, Current Page Size, % change in page size, etc.