AppNeta - Experience: a general guide, and adjusting Apdex

Products

• AppNeta

Issue/Introduction

What are some of the ways I can adjust my apdex?  I have a low score in AppNeta's Experience Monitoring for my web paths.

Cause

Experience provides a way to continuously and systematically test web sites, SaaS applications, and APIs.
Experience operates a web browser that uses the Selenium framework to drive a containerized instance running within the monitoring point.   

Many modern web front-ends are dynamic; they change the content they present based on the user agent string, source OS, cookies, and other parameters that should be accounted for when creating the workflow.
Workflows should always be tests and may require some amount of debugging before it will operate as expected.

Resolution

APM Experience Building Blocks

Experience is built from Web App Groups. These contain Web Paths: a source monitoring point, a target URL, and a workflows. The workflow contains the Selenium commands as well as any variables used in the script.

Example view of a Web App Group as seen in Experience:

Only after clicking on Configure do we see a workflow labeled "Untitled" is already a component:

 

Workflows

Workflows are where the Experience work is done. They can range from a simple open command to confirm a target web page is responding, to large multi-milestone scripts logging in and verifying specific page elements, based on a users business requirements are for monitoring.

Workflows can be built out using a Selenium script recorder, or configured manually from the source page.  If using a script recorder, some parameters such as XPaths will need to be adjusted or commands such as click changed to clickAndWait.  Uses of commands like verifyElementPresent can help the script proceed at the correct pace.

Apdex

Apdex is a highly visible metric displayed next to every Web App Group (as an aggregate score of all the component Web Paths). It is recommend that after successful creation of a workflow, it is allowed to run against the target(s) for a while in order to establish a baseline expectation for execution time. Apdex scores can be adjusted to change the results based on a specific webpage.  For example, a webpage that has a long load time (such as a large web page) may show a lower apdex score, even though it is within normal expectation.

The adjustment can be made here:

Clicking this link will open a new window, shown below.  The defaults are 4 seconds (for Satisfied) and 16 seconds (for Tolerating):