News International tries some RUM

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News International has been testing a new variant of service level management software in an effort to better understand how its users interact with the company's IT systems.

The UK newspaper publishing arm of Rupert Murdoch's media group News Corporation has been trialling a Real User Monitoring (RUM) appliance from Nimsoft.

The Service Director appliance, produced by Nimsoft's recently-acquired subsidiary Indicative Software, was deployed in April by News International.

Jeff Petre, a enterprise systems analyst at News International told IT PRO that the RUM trial was implemented in order to get a clearer picture on performance issues experiences by web users.

“We wanted to gain more visibility into the actual use that our major title pages were seeing,” he said. “We felt that there was a gap between our exiting monitoring information and the true state of our users experiences.

The company trialled the system on the web site for The Times newspaper and looked at users receiving internal server errors and experiencing page load times that were deemed unacceptable.

The data is analysed for troubleshooting performance issues and streamlining capacity planning and can be used for alerting and reporting to improve service level management.

“RUM provided information we had not previously seen and was helpful in highlighting problem pages within our sites,” Petre said. And he added that the system would be very useful, “if it were to be scaled to meet out requirements”.

News International said it was looking forward to furthering its RUM deployment by looking at adding additional Nimsoft functionality, including its NimBUS active transaction monitoring, to provide complete management and visibility of key application performance.

Mark Rivington, vice president of product management at Nimsoft responded that it was still early days for the integration, but delivering Indicative’s Service Director appliance, re-branded as NimBUS RUM, so soon after the acquisition was proof the extended platform could deliver on the requirements of high traffic customers.

“Many IT organisations struggle to know actual end-user application response times, particularly where so much business is run over the web,” he said.

IT PRO recently reported on a survey that found businesses are regularly gambling with application availability.

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