User experience management

Purpose

The UX module aims to complement the total visibility over a monitored service by implementing a number of functions that deal specifically with the concept of end-users and their relationship with the service itself. It is therefore a pre-requisite that the service or application defined in Service Operations has a user interaction component, so that an effective usage of this element can be achieved. Alongside that entity definition, which is mandatory, a number of metrics are necessary to be able to measure the user experience itself.

‘Users’ are purposely open-ended concepts for Service Operations. While they will be commonly utilized to measure the quality of experience (QoE) or quality of service (QoS) of the ‘real’ users of an application or service, in some other scenarios the ‘user' might capture other meanings. For example, it would be perfectly valid to model a fleet of connected vehicles as ‘users’ within the context of an IoT platform, and the user experience measurement, in that scenario, would be gauged utilizing metrics that have to do with latency, performance, connectivity errors ratio and so on.

Closely related to the concept of ‘users’ are ‘sessions' and ‘devices’. Although not mandatory, commonly these three elements are used to model and keep track of everything related to user’s perception of a service and how to monitor it.

All information captured and presented by the module is automatically discovered using the entities' definition form in Service Operations' administration tool. This is done by tagging the relevant entities in the map as ‘user’, ‘device’ or ‘session’ in their type. For more details, please refer to the map configuration section of this documentation. Likewise, all relevant metrics and KPIs are automatically discovered by an association rule. That is to say, all KPIs depending on an entity with type ‘user’ are considered by Service Operations as the ones that matter to characterize end-users' experience, devices performance or sessions stats.

Use Cases Highlights

This module provides the following set of use cases:

Automatic discovery of users, devices and sessions entities.
Automatic discovery of all associated KPIs and KQIs that define end user’s quality of experience and quality of service.
Granular analysis per user, with full access to devices and history of sessions.
Direct linkage to raw data sources and monitors for forensic data analysis.

User Experience Monitoring

The module provides two different views of the general end-user experience of a service:

Aggregated, summarized overview of the status of the service from an end-users standpoint.
Users experience, sessions health and devices performance analysis.
Drill-down analysis per user.

UX Summary and Key Stats

This view is formed by the analysis of the three main elements in the user experience handling: users, sessions and devices status. The top indicators show the total numbers of each of these entities, both totals and those that present some sort of abnormal status—warning or critical in each case. Furthermore, all identified metrics related to each of them are listed on the lower half of the screen, also displaying a sparkline chart that illustrates the overall trend for each KPI. Use ‘send to monitor’ button in each block of KPIs to take the analysis to a specific monitor that includes all listed metrics.

By using the ‘search by user’ dropdown / predictive search element, it is possible to select a single user of the modeled service for a more detailed view of its particular status.

User Drill-Down

By entering a unique ID, a new section of the module will be presented with all relevant metrics and metadata fields related to its sessions, devices and user data. Each block of information is composed of two main blocks of details: metadata associated to each user, device or session entity, and the list of their respective KQIs / KPIs alongside their current values.

Use the following controls to navigate or get additional information:

Go back to the UX summary section.
Device selector: Since a single user can run different devices, a drop-down selector is implemented to filter out the information and metrics based on a concrete device instance.
Sessions analysis: All sessions can be analyzed in detail navigating their respective raw data by clicking on the ‘analyze’ button available on the far right column on the session details table.

Navigate back to the Users Experience summary, by clicking on the ‘back’ button.