Solano County implements TrueView to measure and tune end-user response times for Web applications

Solano County, located between San Francisco and Sacramento, serves nearly 400,000 residents. As the County moved more information and transactions online, they needed a better understanding of how its Internet and intranet sites were performing in terms of user experience. The existing Web application monitoring processes were time and labor-intensive and often occurred after issues impacted multiple users. The Web staff determined they needed a tool to more pro-actively monitor the user experience and to identify the root cause of slow response time or excessive page abort issues. Solano County tasked Joyce Reynolds, an ACS Sr. Technical Consultant, with finding a solution that could report on end-user response times for a Web application.

Reynolds conducted an extensive review of over a dozen products. Ultimately, only Symphoniq offered the needed functionality, including the ability to monitor every single end-user, without having to install software on end-user PCs and the ability to drill down into ASP.NET applications to pinpoint the location of response time problems.

Today, Solano County has implemented TrueView probes on 10 of their Web servers to monitor both its Internet site and its intranet, including its Microsoft SharePoint site. "We get alerts whenever things get way out of scope, as well as monthly reports. The fact that Symphoniq can provide the end-to-end response time and tell whether it is on the server or the network is very helpful," said Reynolds.

Solano County's IT staff has also discovered other TrueView benefits beyond the original requirements. "Now that the developers are starting to build new .NET applications, Symphoniq's .NET product is helping them figure out what to fix," said Reynolds. "We produce a daily report of "hot" .NET method calls for the developers so they can see what problems are current.... TrueView's automated reports catch the issues as they happen."