What is DESK?

Real User Monitoring analyzes the performance of all user interactions with your applications, whether the interactions take place in a browser or on a mobile device. Real User Monitoring also enables application availability monitoring, verification of correct display of UI elements, third-party content provider performance analysis, backend service performance analysis (down to the code level), and performance analysis of all underlying infrastructure.

DESK supports Real User Monitoring for mobile apps as well. The process of monitoring the user experience of your native mobile apps is fundamentally different from monitoring browser-based web applications. This is because mobile-app monitoring involves the compilation, packaging, and shipment of a monitoring library along with your own mobile app package. The process of instrumenting your mobile apps largely depends on the platform of your mobile app. DESK supports both Android and iOS platforms.

Web applications consist of web pages that are served by web servers (for example, Apache Tomcat) and web containers (for example, Docker). The web requests that are sent to a specific Tomcat server are an example of a server-side service. Server-side services may be of various types like web services, web containers, database requests, and custom services. DESK OneAgent can provide details about which applications or services interact with which other services and which services or databases a specific service calls.

DESK enables monitoring of your entire infrastructure including your hosts, processes, and network. You can perform log monitoring and view information such as the total traffic of your network, the CPU usage of your hosts, the response time of your processes, and more. DESK also provides detailed topological information so that you know, for example, which processes run on which hosts and how your processes are interconnected.

DESK OneAgent monitors your entire stack, including private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Whether you run on AWS, Azure, Cloud Foundry, or OpenStack, DESK OneAgent auto-detects all virtualized components and keeps up with all changes. DESK OneAgent can be integrated with your virtualized infrastructure, allowing you to connect the dots between the dependencies of the vCenters in your data center, the processes that run on them, and your applications.

DESK seamlessly integrates with existing Docker environments and automatically monitors your containerized applications and services. DESK hooks into containers and provides code for injecting OneAgent into containerized processes.

There’s no need to modify your Docker images, modify run commands, or create additional containers to enable Docker monitoring. Simply install DESK OneAgent on your hosts that serve containerized applications and services. DESK automatically detects the creation and termination of containers and monitors the applications and services contained within those containers.

A key feature of DESK is Davis, the DESK AI-driven causation engine. Davis relies on artificial intelligence to continuously monitor every aspect of your applications, services, and infrastructure to automatically learn the baseline performance metrics and dependencies of all these components. DESK also automatically learns the baseline response times and failure rates of the key requests that are vital to the success of your business (customer newletter signups, customers adding items to an online shopping cart, requesting a live demo, etc) so that you can track success toward your business' conversion goals. Problem detection and reporting is based on these baseline values. DESK determines for example when a detected slowdown or error-rate increase justifies the generation of a new problem event.