SmartBear Software has announced new a new product named AlertSite UXM. The SaaS (or on premise) software itself is a package designed to bring load testing, synthetic (and real) transaction monitoring to software developers.
The company cites recent analyst comments to build its argument for more testing and monitoring. Gartner stated, "By 2014, 75% of the Fortune 1000 will offer public web APIs." (Gartner Research Document: Predicts 2014: Application Development, Brian Prentice, David Mitchell Smith, Andy Kyte, Nathan Wilson, Gordon Van Huizen, Van L. Baker — November 19, 2013), but these APIs provide a point of potential user experience problems.
This is proof enough (says SmartBear) that we (as software developers) will be faced with looking at where user experience issues do occur, as we try to determine why critical applications fail to perform as required — and AlertSite UXM works not just for applications, but also APIs to assist in rapid root cause analysis.
Pre-deployment load testing can also be performed. As a single platform, AlertSite UXM offers application and API management capabilities with code-level diagnostics.
"As a result, development, QA, as well as operations and business teams, can all work from the same data, efficiently share their insights, and closely collaborate to reduce the time to find and resolve issues while also moving the organization closer to a continuous delivery software model," said Rich Caplow, SVP product commercialization at SmartBear.
AlertSite UXM is composed of three new modules:
- AlertSite UXM Synthetic — measures simulated users and includes easy-to-use and deploy transaction tracing based on innovative technology acquired from APM vendor Lucierna.
- AlertSite UXM Real — measures actual user transactions down to code level root cause analysis.
- AlertSite UXM Load — highly scalable load test service to validate application performance from the user's point of view.
Jonah Kowall, Research Vice President of IT Operations at Gartner, and Will Cappelli, Research Vice President of Enterprise Management at Gartner, note, "The demand and importance placed on APM tools has increased significantly during the past several years, and will continue as applications and infrastructures become more complex, dynamic, and additional layers of abstraction are introduced (for example, virtualization, SDN, and API abstraction)." (Gartner Research Document: Gartner Hype Cycle for Real-Time Infrastructure — Application Performance Monitoring, Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli, July 2013).
