Access Symphony offers the IT function in your business, as well as users, a range of tools and features. One of them is performance monitoring. The aim of performance monitoring is to improve the user experience by maximising user TX scores. The user TX score is a benchmark to determine the optimisation level of each user in your organisation.
Access Symphony analyses a range of metrics to produce user TX scores. Below we outline six of the most important – three application metrics (CPU use, memory performance, and GPU performance) and three device metrics (overall CPU performance, overall memory performance, and overall hard disk performance).
App Analytics That Are Crucial to the User Experience
1. CPU Use
Apps use CPUs in different ways, with added variation depending on the type and model of CPU, and the configuration of the device. By monitoring the CPU performance of an app, we can identify apps that are putting CPUs under unnecessary strain. This could be when the app is running or when it is performing a background process.
Why is monitoring CPU performance important? A device CPU is responsible for performing the tasks needed to run applications. It isn’t just the applications that you run, either, as CPUs are also constantly performing tasks for the operating system and other background apps. The problem is that CPUs have a limited capacity. Push them too far, and the device will begin to slow down, impacting the user experience.
Therefore, monitoring how apps use CPUs is essential.
2. Memory Performance
Apps need memory to run, but if an app’s code is not fully optimised, it will use the device’s memory inefficiently, leading to a loss of performance. Monitoring how apps use memory helps to identify those apps that have poorly written code.
Understanding the memory performance of apps can also help identify resource allocation issues within your IT landscape. This can help with purchasing, configuring, and provisioning new devices to ensure they are capable of running the required apps.
3. GPU
For apps that have a high graphics load, the performance of the GPU (graphic processing unit) is critical to the overall performance of the device. In situations where the GPU struggles to output the display to the screen, the device can slow down, and users can suffer from lag where the images on the screen are out of sync with other tasks being performed by the device – such as the playing of audio.
While a lot of business apps don’t generally place much strain on reasonably specified GPUs, there are certain types of applications where the performance of the GPU is essential. Image and video editing software fall into this category.
That said, monitoring the GPU performance of all apps is worthwhile as the GPU does impact the user experience.
Device Analytics That Are Crucial to the User Experience
1. Overall Average CPU Performance
While it is important to monitor how individual apps use a device’s CPU, the reality is that CPUs are continuously called on to perform multiple tasks for a variety of apps and OS processes. Therefore, the overall performance of the CPU is a crucial determining factor in user experience.
2. Overall Average Memory Performance
Monitoring the average memory used by the device is essential for the user experience as memory performance is directly linked to the performance of the device. Effective monitoring can give an indication of the devices that need a memory upgrade, as well as devices where the available memory is being underutilised. This can allow corrective action as well as helping with future planning, including preventing the over-specifying of devices.
Device memory monitoring can also help identify memory leaks. A memory leak is where the amount of memory that is available for processes starts to reduce. This reduction results in a degradation in performance and can lead to the device becoming unusable.
3. Overall Average Hard Disk Performance
Hard drives can vary in performance, whatever type of hard drive a device has installed, e.g., SATA, SCSI, or SSD. Hard drives can run slowly, they can overheat, and the blocks used to read and write data can fail over time, reducing the overall capacity of the drive. Hard drives can also simply get too full, with too much data and/or software.
By monitoring the performance of a device’s hard drive, your IT team can identify hard drives that are not running as expected or that are coming to the end of their usable life. Action can then be taken before the user experiences any significant degradation in performance.
Monitoring average hard disk performance also enables your IT team to understand the specifications that are needed for specific users, functions, and teams.
Continuously Optimising the User TX Score Through Effective Monitoring
In many organisations, IT is largely a reactive function. For example, a user experiences a performance issue because an app is putting strain on the CPU of their device, or because the device doesn’t have enough memory. The IT team then react to this complaint to rectify the problem.
Monitoring key performance data allows your IT team to transition to a proactive function, where potential problems are identified as early as possible using analytics, boosting the user experience. This is a continuous process, but with a tool like Access Symphony, it is largely automated, minimising the level of intervention required by your technical team.
If Symphony Signal is a product you’re interested in, come along to our launch event:
Access Symphony Signal – Product Launch – Access IT Automation
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