Tutorial: How to measure the end-user experience

A quality end-user experience is perhaps the most important benchmark of a healthy network. Any error, extra latency, or downtime degrades an otherwise positive experience for users. Fortunately, Observer Reporting Server reports can help you visualize these degradations so you can maintain a quality user experience.

This tutorial guides you through creating a report that measures the end-user experience. Because end-user experience can be affected by hundreds of factors, the report you are creating is not comprehensive. Instead, the tutorial provides you an understanding of how to create your own user-experience report using this as a foundation. Before you begin the tutorial, consider viewing the finished report and its individual components in Figure 1 and its accompanying table.

Figure 6. Finished Example Report

Number	Report Element	Description
1	Graph	Client Top 10 RTT (ms)—shows the top ten, worst average round-trip times (in milliseconds) and the client machines associated with them. This graph helps you see if certain clients are experiencing Observer a degraded user experience, which may warrant additional investigation or troubleshooting. See #id122DA0VA0XW/id1265F08H0GA.
2	Graph	Server Top 10 RTT (ms)—shows the top ten, worst average round-trip times (in milliseconds) and the servers associated with them. This graph helps you see if certain servers are contributing to a degraded user experience, which may warrant additional investigation or troubleshooting. See #id122DA100WJX/id1265F09B0PV.
3	Table	Top 10 Client/Server TCP RTT (ms)—shows the top ten, worst average round-trip times (in milliseconds) and the clients or servers associated with them. This table helps you see if more servers than clients are contributing to a degraded user experience or vice-versa. Each may warrant additional investigation or troubleshooting. You can also click the “drill down” column of this table to see a sub-report of the target server or client. See #id122DA30L0QG/id1265F0A08PT.
4	Grid	Web—shows the average round-trip time (in milliseconds) to servers belonging to Salesforce.com. A poor, average round-trip time signifies an issue with reaching Salesforce servers adequately, resulting in a degraded user experience. In this tutorial, Salesforce is a mock presentation tier of a multi-tier architecture; it is only selected to aid you in completing the tutorial, and may not represent a real scenario. See #id122DC0S20JW/id1265F0A0W24.
5	Grid	Stations—shows the average response time (in milliseconds) for all MSRPC host-side traffic on a local subnet. A poor, average response time may signify a problem with Windows stations’ ability to communicate or access Windows services. This potentially degrades the user experience and should be investigated. In this tutorial, MSRPC is a mock logic tier of a multi-tier architecture; it is only selected to aid you in completing the tutorial, and may not represent a real scenario.See #id122DC0VF0VJ/id1265F0B0YMY.
6	Grid	Database—shows the average response (in milliseconds) to a specific MySQL database server on the local subnet. Because the MySQL server is located in the local subnet, a poor, average round-trip time may signify a problem with hardware or configuration. This potentially degrades the user experience and should be investigated. In this tutorial, MySQL is a mock logic tier of a multi-tier architecture; it is only selected to aid you in completing the tutorial, and may not represent a real scenario. See #id122DC0WD0ZV/id1265F0C0BCH.

Note: This tutorial only teaches you the concepts of report creation. After you master the concepts, you can create reports that better suit your needs.

Before creating items like graphs and tables, you must create a new report. Reports simply store the report elements that give your report its content. Report elements are graphs, tables, and the like. Create your new report by completing the following steps:

1.	Choose Reports > Business Group Reports.

2.	Click the New button. The Report Setup window appears.

3.	Ensure the General Options tab is selected, and type User Experience in the Report Name box.

4.	(Optional) In the Report Description box, type Report shows top 10 highest client/server RTT, plus multi-tier application response times.