User experience management
Purpose
The UX module aims to complement the total visibility over a given service by implementing a number of functions that deal specifically with the concept of end-users and their relationship with that modeled service. 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 made. Alongside that entity definition, which is mandatory, a number of metrics will be necessary so as to measure the user experience itself.
Users are purposely open-ended concepts for Service Operations. While they will be commonly used to measure the quality of experience or quality of service of the "real" users of an application or service, in some other scenarios the user might take on 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 measuring 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 user concept are sessions and devices. Although not mandatory, commonly these three elements are the most important entities to model and keep track of for a proper characterization of everything related to user's perception of a service and how to monitor it to extract meaningful insights.
All information captured and presented by the module is automatically discovered using the entities' definition form in Service Operations' administration tool. This definition is accomplished simply by tagging the relevant entities in the model as user, device or session in their type. For more details, please refer to the model configuration section of this documentation. Likewise, all relevant metrics and KPIs are automatically discovered by an association rule, i.e., all KPIs depending on an entity with type user are considered by Service Operations as the ones that determine the end-users UX.
Use cases highlights
This module provides the following set of use cases:
Automatic discovery of users, devices and sessions.
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
The module provides two different views of the general end-user experience of a service:
Aggregated, summarized overview of the status of the service.
Users' experience, session health and device performance analysis.
Drill-down analysis per user.
UX summary and key stats
This summarized view is conformed 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. All identified metrics related to each of them are listed on the lower half of the screen, which also displays a sparkline chart that illustrates the overall trend for each KPI. Use the send to monitor button in each block of KPIs to take the analysis to a specific monitor that includes all listed metrics.
Utilizing 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
Once you enter 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 dropdown 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.
