Get to know your users with CA App Synthetic Monitor & App Experience Analytics
Dashing car games seem so retro these days. Nevertheless, I decided to have some retro style fun with my friends. At the arena, while I drove in a boring linear fashion, avoiding and escaping collisions as much possible, it was my friends who were having real fun on a platform like this! They were all over the place, swerving, colliding into each other, screaming and doing everything that you would generally associate as fun at a dashing car arena.
I confess I cannot get my product off my mind and it struck me that evening that I was behaving like a well-controlled, pre-configured synthetic transaction. My friends on the contrary were real users. Driving in all directions at variable speeds, taking every path and being unpredictable in their actions in general. Aren’t the real users of your application similar in nature? Don’t they come over to your application from various corners of the world, using any device, browser type and version they have access to, variable network speeds often slower if using mobile internet versus a Wi-Fi? How is it then you can cater to such a diverse group of your user base?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to set your synthetic tests so that they represent as close a scenario to the actual users of your application? Here is how you could do it, and do it for free using a combination of App Synthetic Monitor (ASM) and App Experience Analytics trial accounts.
Month 1 - Synthetic Monitoring:
- You could get started by accessing this URL and have a look at the capabilities of CA ASM
- Without signing up for an account, you may want to check the status of your web page.
- You may then want to sign up for a free 30-day trial available on the CA ASM home page. We don’t need to provide any credit card details to sign up for a free trial account
- Using the password that is emailed to you on the email address provided by you during your trial registration, login into your ASM account
- By clicking on Settings->Monitors->New Monitors you are able to get started setting up synthetic tests against your web application.
- Observe the results of your tests over a period of three weeks.
- If you would like to extend your trial period by another 30 days, please drop me an email at Chaitan.Shet@ca.com and I would be really excited to talk to you and help.
Month 2- Application Experience Analytics:
- Should you be satisfied with the value provided by ASM, you may now want to move on to the next stage, which is compare how your educated assumptions (synthetic tests) performs against real user behavior.
- For this you may want to do a rapid two click sign up for a free 30-day CA App Experience Analytics trial account from your ASM Home page itself.
- With a very simple configuration to the web pages you want to monitor, you are able to get started with App Experience Analytics and get value out of it within minutes as your live users start streaming into your web application.
- Over a period of a couple of weeks reflect back on how your actual users have been using your application and compare it with the way you setup your synthetic tests.
So we actually have a total of 60 days of free monitoring (Synthetic and Real user monitoring respectively).