Knoa Drives Proactive Resolution of Application and End-User Performance Issues

Knoa Software®, the leading provider of end-user experience and performance management software, today announced significant enhancements to its family of Experience and Performance Management solutions for corporate software applications.

Available today, Version 5.5 of Knoa Experience and Performance Manager (EPM) provides total monitoring coverage of end-user behavior and experience across enterprise applications, such as SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Siebel CRM, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft Enterprise Suite, Amdocs, as well as other major application vendors and custom applications. Knoa EPM monitors application execution at the end-user level, and provides precise metrics about the user experience as well as measurements on how effectively people execute when working with enterprise applications. Knoa provides the most accurate metrics possible on the actual application performance experienced by real end-users and an unprecedented level of visibility into end-user performance with the application.

“The focus of Version 5.5 is proactive resolution,” said Lori Wizdo, vice president of Marketing for Knoa Software. “Knoa EPM 5.5 introduces advanced end-user analytics, the most comprehensive alerting available in the performance management industry and enhanced correlation and analysis capabilities – all of which enable customers to quickly turn the Knoa end-user and application performance metrics into proactive remediation initiatives to both improve performance and reduce costs.”

“The increasing interest in end-user experience monitoring is not surprising. It is almost tautological to say that a user's opinion of an IT-enabled service will be a function of his or her experience of that service. Without some way to measure the quality of that experience, IT operations management groups will be in the dark regarding the most fundamental dimension of the relationship with its business customer,” said Will Cappelli, Research Vice President, Gartner, Inc. “But, to provide sufficient value-drive investment, in this economy, end-user monitoring tools need to provide deep insight into end-user behavior and application usage patterns and provide performance base-lining to ensure IT service degradation is understood, analyzed, remediated and, in certain cases, avoided.”
The proactive management capabilities of Knoa EPM 5.5 offer value for both IT and business management and include:

• Dynamic Base-lining which generates performance baselines from historical trends to automatically identify instances where performance is trending downwards. IT operations teams can take proactive action before SLA thresholds have been breached and business has been disrupted. Dynamic base-lining can also be leveraged with user performance metrics, allowing business application managers to proactively address negative trends in utilization and adoption, user proficiency, user productivity and process execution and compliance.
• Targeted Alerting which enables pinpoint alerting on any captured metric (utilization, quality, performance, error) for any combination of user groups/transactions/processes. The granularity with which alerts can be configured enables the delivery of exceptionally actionable information. At one end, IT operations can be alerted to any significant incident across the entire application landscape and user population. At the other end, a single business manager can be alerted when productivity has dropped for a specific group of employees.
• Correlated Analytics Dashboards which make it easy to compare values for sets of related metrics. The Dashboards generate dynamic views of key performance indicators and identify “top offenders.” Multi-dimensional drill-down capabilities identify cause-and-effect relationships that might otherwise go undetected.
• Dynamic Benchmarking which provides the ability to define two timeframes and compare all Knoa EPM metrics across those time frames. This analysis helps identify performance changes after application upgrades, expansions, environmental changes or proactive remediation programs.

Knoa EPM 5.5 further delivers on Knoa’s vision to deliver end-user experience solutions that help IT and the business perform better together by introducing new functionality which correlates IT transactions with business tasks and processes. Instead of reporting with arcane screen names and transaction identifiers, Knoa EPM presents an analysis of system performance in business contexts, such as “create new account,” “save purchase order” or “search opportunities.” EPM 5.5 also delivers the ability to associate application components with end-to-end business processes (such as Order-to-Cash or Procure-to-Pay) so that all Knoa performance metrics can be reported with the context of the relevant business process. In addition to providing a meaningful business context for identifying and analyzing user and application performance, this greatly increases transparency into IT operations for business stakeholders.

"With this new release, Knoa once again advances end-user experience management," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates. "Knoa uniquely combines IT performance with granular insights into end-user behaviors and service usage as they impact business objectives – both in terms of the responsiveness and performance of critical business applications, as well as cost-related insights for financial planning and service portfolio optimization. And this new release, with its advanced analytics and targeted, proactive alerts, strengthens Knoa’s solution as a yet more active, versatile resource. ”

About Knoa
Knoa Software is leading the performance management industry with end-user experience management solutions that reach beyond infrastructure and application performance to monitor, measure and manage how end-users are utilizing corporate software applications to optimize business process execution. Knoa customers not only know if core enterprise applications are delivering an acceptable user experience, but also, if application users are executing key processes effectively and efficiently – the key to achieving business value and ROI. Knoa was recently selected as a Gartner “Cool Vendor,” for its capabilities in end-user experience and performance management and was listed as a Leader in the “Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End-user Experience Monitoring.” Knoa is headquartered in New York, NY. For more information about Knoa, please visit www.knoa.com.