Quest Software, Inc. has released a comprehensive End User Performance Management solution. According to today’s announcement, the new solution empowers application owners and IT administrators with the ability to improve the end user experience of their critical applications and assure optimal service levels by providing deep visibility into the application. The Quest End User Performance Management solution alerts users of performance issues and enables accountability by pinpointing the source of those issues, significantly reducing time to resolution.

In the announcement, the company pointed out that end users of applications -- including consumers browsing Web sites, customers accessing external-facing applications and employees accessing information within an organization's internal enterprise -- determine the true value of business applications based on how effectively they are able to use them. A negative experience can directly impact bottom line revenue generation or cost cutting initiatives because it can result in lost sales or decreased employee productivity. By effectively measuring and managing the end user experience, organizations are able to better manage business objectives and ensure operational efficiency.

According to Gartner, "The results from a poll given at Gartner's Data Center Conference reveal that IT operations organizations are focusing on end-to-end response-time monitoring technologies as their first priority for availability- and performance-monitoring investments in 2005. The study also found that the top two end-to-end monitoring styles that IT organizations plan to invest in are active and passive. IT operations is likely to favor tools that enable 360-degree visibility and support drill-down to component-specific tools for troubleshooting and problem resolution." (Poll Reveals Buying Preferences for Availability and Performance Monitoring, Debra Curtis, Cameron Haight, Raymond Paquet, April 18, 2005)

The Quest End User Performance Management solution provides the ability to perform both active and passive monitoring of user transactions on both custom/J2EE and packaged applications such as SAP, Oracle E-Business, PeopleSoft and Siebel. It combines Quest Foglight Transaction Recorder (for active monitoring using synthetic user activity) and Quest User Experience Monitor (for continuous passive monitoring of all real user activity) to ensure application availability and optimal performance around the clock.

The Quest End User Performance Management solution uses customizable dashboards to display reports on specific business activities and services across traditional and composite applications (HTTP and SOAP). This improves efficiency and communication between different IT and business groups throughout the organization. In addition, the solution delivers on-demand diagnostics information on user activities as well as capacity, performance and usage reports to help IT teams effectively troubleshoot performance problems and enable quick resolution.

"At times, end users may be experiencing performance and availability issues even though the IT infrastructure for the applications may be running at optimum levels," said Larry Humphries, vice president application management solutions, Quest Software. "The Quest End User Performance Management solution allows administrators to pinpoint the issues and assists in resolution, allowing for total application performance management."