How are other users using Splunk for Browser Experience Monitoring?

[paimonsoror]

Hi folks. One challenge I have on my plate is providing my company with a viable user experience dashboard.

We are currently investigating products to add to our existing vendor based APM suite, but I also want to take this opportunity to see how we can use Splunk appropriately to do this type of analysis.

Curious on how the users here are solving a similar use case? Thanks!

[rjthibod]

Disclaimer: I am a partner and vendor with a browser UX technology.

I would say the answer depends on what exactly you are monitoring.

• Are you trying to monitor how specific applications or sites perform in the browser? Are you trying to instrument specific components or sub-frames or transactions?

  • The answer is mostly a vendor-based APM solution. Proprietary tools are likely the only way to drilldown into that level of detail, and most of those vendors sell their own backend that may have loose integration with Splunk.

• Are you looking for high-level metrics about the browser (e.g., load times, resource utilization, etc.), but not deep diving instrumentation?

  • For internal users?
    • Products like uberAgent and Layer8 can do that, and they are designed to pump data to Splunk, i.e., they don't compete with Splunk on the backend.
    • Can deploy the forwarder to back office servers to collect logs that may indicate crashes or custom logged metrics from internal sources. Will likely have to create your own dashboards/apps for finely tuned reports
  • For external users?
    • Vendor-specific APM solution (see first bullet)
    • Can deploy the forwarder to back office servers to collect logs that may indicate crashes or custom logged metrics from internal sources. Will likely have to create your own dashboards/apps for finely tuned reports

[paimonsoror]

Thanks for your response.

Ideally what we are looking for is to stat with some high level metrics like you had mentioned. This would be a mix between both internal and external users. Sounds like based on your response that essentially we will need to supplement splunk with the use of a vendor driven solution to get the metrics we are looking for.

I will have to take a look at the two products you mentioned as that would surely solve a gap when it comes to monitoring a tool like Citrix, so I really appreciate the insight there.