Good Advice On Web Ops: Don't Forget The Users

Coradiant is working with Splunk to add user performance and experience information to the types of data that Splunk collects in its IT search engine. The two companies are looking to provide a more integrated analysis of Web operations performance.Splunk's system collects information on networks, platforms, databases, and other systems behind a Web site. But prior to this relationship, that didn't include what Coradiant calls "user performance management" data -- a look at the outcomes of user sessions, what pages they clicked on, any problems they encountered, and so on. Now, if a visitor has a problem at a Web site, a Web operations analyst or IT professional can correlate that problem with data on various systems to determine precisely where the problem occurred.

Alternatively, a system error could prompt an analysis of specific users' sessions to determine how the error impacted a site visitor. Integration with Splunk is now supported in Coradiant's TrueSight appliance.

The alliance comes at a time when IT professionals, typified by those attending the Interop show, need a greater understanding of business issues, such as the need to ensure that visitors to a corporate Web site have a positive experience, says Alistair Croll, VP of product management at Coradiant. "Talking about things at a user level ensures IT is relevant to the business," says Croll, who is also a faculty member for the Interop educational sessions. Cisco CEO John Chambers similarly cited the need for IT to ground itself in business strategy in his morning keynote.

In fact, Croll notes that the emergence of Ajax applications such as Google Maps and others that perform a significant amount of data prefetching are consuming enough network resources that Web performance is becoming a major focus of IT and networking professionals. "People here [at Interop] are concerned with how the cool Web stuff is going to make them miserable," he says. "That's why Web operations is relevant to Interop."