October 12,2007

Last week I began a discussion about Longitude’s ability to monitor and report on transactions. In my October 4 entry I discussed simple transactions which give users yes or no answers about how their infrastructure components are working. In this week’s entry I will discuss more advanced transactions – user experience transactions – which are measured synthetically and give users qualitative information about how their web-based applications are performing.

Longitude enables customers to emulate the experience of a web site user by recording web transactions of interest, and then replaying them to assess the availability, response and content of the site. They can then specify how frequently they want the transaction to run. Longitude will initiate the synthetic transaction as scheduled, and report events when problems are detected.

Longitude can provide intelligent alerts to notify a user whenever a transaction fails, does not return expected content, or exceeds a chosen response threshold. It supports the HTTP and HTTPS protocols, allows you to separate transactions into individual steps, and can encrypt login information. Alerts can be as specific as needed, and can even provide instructions regarding how to troubleshoot and resolve the problem. Longitude can then generate reports and graph important metrics while automatically archiving the data from the transactions.