Customers expect high-performing applications. It’s imperative, therefore, that developers be able to identify problems and apply fixes quickly. If they can do it before customers notice, even better.

The challenge is parsing though huge amounts of data to identify issues. It is a complex task that can take a long time and delay problem resolution—and create unhappy customers.

Developers need an analytics tool to help them, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) said its HPE AppPulse Trace fulfills that need. The newest addition to HPE’s AppPulse Suite, new tool helps developers analyze user actions to pinpoint and fix issues at the transaction level.

HPE AppPulse Trace monitors end-to-end web transactions and provides code-level visibility. It helps development teams find errors before they reach end users by isolating the problem and fixing it quickly, said Lior Matkovitch, director of product management for the AppPulse Suite.

Key features of HPE AppPulse Trace include the following:

• The ability to trace exact lines of code: The module offers insight into the user experience, including user actions, flows, error messages, client code and device state by drilling down to the exact line of code

• One-to-one server correlation: HPE AppPulse Trace correlates issues from the user experience and user actions with server-side problems. This helps lower costs by reducing triage and fix times in the data center.

Without the capabilities provided in AppPulse Trace, identifying issues is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, said Monica Benjamin, director of product marketing at HPE Software.

“You know there’s an issue. You know there’s a bigger problem. But you don’t have tools. You don’t have the visibility,” she said. “When AppPulse Trace provides you with that that visibility, that magnifying glass, into the server side of the issue, it’s allowing you to make proactive business decisions before it affects the users. It’s saving you time. And time, we all know, equals money.”

HPE AppPulse Trace is one of three modules in the HPE AppPulse Suite, which is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. The other modules are HPE AppPulse Active, which allows developers to emulate user behavior to identify problems and fix them before the application is moved into production, and HPE AppPulse Mobile, which tracks the digital user experience in mobile applications that are in production.

Benefits to users

Benefits AppPulse Trace users have seen include being able to identify bottlenecks, identifying previously unseen problems and reduced response time, Matkovitch said.

For Travelist, a travel metasearch and price comparison platform, being able to trace transactions end to end is critical because slowdowns affect traffic and, ultimately, revenue, said Alex Krasov, R&D lead at Travelist, in HPE’s news release.

“With HPE AppPulse Trace, we can reduce manual work and fix issues quickly before users are impacted,” he said.

AppPulse Trace is available now as a trial, with the model being generally available in March 2016.

Photo credit: Melmak via pixabay