February 2010 Newsletter
Who Is Gomez — And Why Do We Like Him?
Gomez is a Web Performance Management solution that allows Quadax to monitor the performance of our Web-based applications. Now that all Quadax applications, HARP, Xpeditor, PAS, and OnBase, are Web-based, we can use Gomez to “watch” their performance or response times. Response time is the time that it takes for a program to respond after you perform an action (click a button or link, press enter) until it is available again for another action, such as entering information on a form. Obviously, this is very important to our users, and Gomez enables us to keep a close watch on that key performance metric.
Gomez can gather statistics about the response times for our applications in two ways: a synthetic test or actual user monitoring.
Synthetic Test
A synthetic test consists of a script that runs on a computer in a remote location on a set schedule. For our synthetic test, we created a test user that logs into our application, goes to a few heavily used screens, brings up a significant amount of data, and then logs out. Scripts can be configured to run from many locations within the United States and even in many different countries of the world. We configured our scripts to run on computers in California to simulate the response time for users in that area, which is geographically distant from our data center.
Actual User Monitoring
By putting a JavaScript tag into our Web pages, Gomez can gather statistics about actual user sessions. The data collected is only statistical information about the response time in a session and contains nothing sensitive about an individual user. The data tells us how long it takes to transfer files and for Web servers to respond. This allows us to monitor an application's performance during real usage.
Alerts
We configured Gomez to gather statistics about session response times. After establishing a baseline of acceptable response times, we set up Gomez alerts for times outside the acceptable range. If response times begin to degrade, Gomez alerts are e-mailed to the appropriate personnel at Quadax, allowing us to proactively monitor response times and react quickly to any potential issues.
Summary
By using Gomez, we have begun to learn a great deal about the response times of our applications and the many factors that have an effect on them. The ultimate goal is to provide you with exceptional response times in all our products. If you would like to learn more about this monitoring tool, visit the Gomez Web site.