DESK glossary

A performance-measurement standard that shows the relationship between recorded performance measurements and real-user satisfaction. Apdex offers a uniform means of measuring how well performance meets user expectations. For full details on the Apdex standard, please visit Apdex.org. In the context of DESK, Apdex is used to give you a quick and easy rating that you can use to evaluate the satisfaction of your application's end users. Apdex ratings in DESK are based on application-specific thresholds. An Apdex measurement rating of 1 equates to perfect performance. An Apdex rating below 0.5 equates to poor performance. For more details about how Apdex is applied in DESK, please see What is an Apdex rating?

A web application consists of web pages that are served by web servers and web containers, for example Tomcat. A web or mobile application is built upon services that process requests like web requests, web service calls, and messaging. Within DESK, the term application refers to the front-end part that you can access via a browser or a mobile app.

DESK monitors all of your application's services, processes, and infrastructure. By evaluating all components collectively, DESK pinpoints exactly how each service contributes to the performance of your application. For example, in Java monitoring, the host, JVM, and processes are seen as a whole.

DESK monitors all the individual components that applications are built upon: web requests, database requests, processes, services, and more. It's these individual components working together that collectively deliver what your end users view as a complete application. DESK identifies and tracks each of these individual application components at a highly granular level. DESK doesn't simply identify that a service is running on a server in a process but rather identifies all the details of these components. For example, DESK can show you which of your web services is running on your Tomcat application server and how your Tomcat server's performance is affected by its host, or even your VMware vCenter server. In this way, DESK gives you insight into the performance of your unique application stack, including all its components and connections.

A simulated user visit that monitors your application’s business critical workflows. Use the DESK recorder to record an exact sequence of clicks and user input that you're interested in monitoring for availability and performance. Once you’ve captured the mouse clicks and additional user actions that you want your browser clickpath to include, your synthetic monitor runs automatically at regular intervals to test your site’s availability and functionality.

The equivalent of a simulated user visiting your application using a modern web browser. Browser monitors can be configured to run from any of our global locations at a frequency of up to once every 5 minutes. Browser monitors alert you when your application is inaccessible from the Internet or when baseline performance degrades significantly.

See Monitoring candidates

The web-based user interface that manages a single DESK Managed cluster. The CMC allows you to:

• View the deployment status and configure your DESK Managed cluster.
• Manage cluster nodes and ActiveGates.
• Manage your monitoring environments.
• Create user accounts and groups.
• View licensing information and consumption status.
• View audit log and cluster events.

Determining the root causes of a process crash. DESK accelerates crash analysis by providing a process crash entry for each affected process and monitored host. Details available for crash analysis may include a native core dump, a Java core dump, or an abnormal program exit due to exceptions. DESK also provides access to additional crash artifacts, such as hs_err_pid files for Java crashes, text files providing Linux and Windows core dump analysis, and files containing the .NET, Java, or Node.js exceptions that are potentially responsible for crashes.

The DESK monitoring infrastructure. A cluster contains one or more cluster nodes that are set up using the DESK Managed installer. After successful installation, each DESK Managed cluster node runs a DESK Server, an ActiveGate, and one instance of Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and NGINX. Each cluster also provides a web-based management interface called a Cluster Management Console.

A DESK component that provides secure and reliable communication with cloud-based DESK cluster nodes. It is downloaded from your DESK Managed cluster and installed within your infrastructure. Similar to a proxy, ActiveGate reduces bandwidth requirements by encrypting and compressing network communication. It also provides monitoring of virtual infrastructure. Stopping or disabling ActiveGate reduces the monitoring capabilities of hosts that use a Cluster ActiveGate to communicate with DESK clusters.

From the perspective of DESK Smartscape environment-topology mapping, a data center is either:

• A grouping of virtual machines running in an Amazon cloud instance. DESK maps Availability Zones to your data center.
• Or a set of vCenter-based virtual hosts that transmit data to DESK via a single ActiveGate. You may have multiple vCenter servers or standalone ESXi hosts associated with a single data center.

Each virtual host within a data center must have DESK OneAgent installed on it. You'll see at least one data center in Smartscape view if you have an ActiveGate installed. If you don't have an ActiveGate in your environment, Smartscape can't create a data center for your topology map.

Note that DESK provides real-world geographic location details for data centers—look for data center location details in Smartscape and on Host pages (in the Properties pane).

Davis Assistant is the conversational interface for DESK that enables you to ask common performance-related questions in chat applications and voice-enabled devices. Davis enables you to easily gain actionable insights into your DESK monitoring data using natural language responses and chart visualizations. Supported chat applications and devices include Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Slack.

DESK provides you with deep visibility into the performance of all the services that comprise your web application: web services, web containers, database requests, custom services, and more. You can even track service performance over time, with both historical and up-to-the-moment data.

The amount of time a synthetic monitor or synthetic action waits before the web application is ready to initiate another user action.

See monitoring environment

An ActiveGate that is bound to your environment, and thus only handles traffic from OneAgent instances that belong to the same environment as the ActiveGate. An Environment ActiveGate is downloaded from your DESK environment and installed within your infrastructure.

An Environment ActiveGate only handles traffic from OneAgent, not from other ActiveGates. An Environment ActiveGate can communicate to a DESK server either directly or via a Cluster ActiveGate.

A Smartscape visualization of the hosts, processes, services, applications, and data centers in your DESK monitoring environment and the relationships between those entities.

With no manual configuration, Smartscape auto-discovers all the components and dependencies of your entire technology stack end-to-end and visualizes them in an easy to understand environment topology map.

A manual action performed on a server in your environment. Events are reported by DESK and, where applicable, correlated with detected problems. Examples of events include machine reboots, system shutdowns, process restarts, and new code deployments. Any manual action you perform on a server is an event, even if it's a regularly scheduled event.

Any service called by your application or another service that isn't directly monitored by DESK OneAgent is considered to be an external service. DESK maintains awareness of external services when they send or receive requests from your monitored services and applications. DESK doesn't however receive performance data related to external services. An exception to this rule is database services. If you have DESK OneAgent installed on a machine from which JDBC calls are sent to your database, DESK will provide a full spectrum of performance analysis related to the called database service (even when DESK OneAgent isn't installed on the database server machine itself).

The size of a host for licensing purposes (based on the amount of RAM provided by a host). We use the amount of RAM on a monitored server as a measuring stick to determine the size of a host (i.e., how many host units it comprises). The advantage of this approach is its simplicity—we don’t take technology-specific factors into consideration (for example, the number of JVMs or the number of microservices that are hosted on a server). It doesn't matter if a host is .NET-based, Java-based, or something else. You can have 10 JVMs or 1,000 JVMs; such factors don't affect the amount of monitoring that an environment consumes.

For full details, see How to calculate monitoring consumption.

Represents the consumption of a host unit over a time period. 1 host unit hour equates to 1 host unit being consumed for 1 hour. A host with 16 GB of RAM (i.e., 1 host unit) running for a full day consumes 24 host unit hours.

For full details, see How to calculate monitoring consumption.

This DESK multidimensional visual interface lets you analyze multiple dimensions of the top three findings of your application's usage. With Hyperlyzer, you can see details on where your users are located, what browser versions they're using, their operating systems, and the number of different user actions your application has received. The Hyperlyzer wheel interface enables you to quickly focus on specific dimensions of interest.

Hyperlyzer data is based on detection rules, which can be configured separately for each application.

Key requests are requests that are of particular interest in your web-application environment because they're a critical measure of the success of your business (for example, a login request or a shopping-cart checkout request), because they provide vital technical functionality that your application relies on, or because they involve complex calculations. DESK provides advanced monitoring functionality for such key requests so you can monitor them with extra care.

Key requests feature long-term metric history and dedicated dashboard tiles for charting and direct access from your dashboard. Key requests are always alerted on, even when they contribute less than 1% of throughput. They also provide custom thresholds.

Key requests are highlighted in the Key requests section of each service overview page. This visibility is particularly valuable for low-volume, high-importance requests that would otherwise appear at the bottom of the Top requests section of a service overview page.

The intelligent evaluation of data-logging records that are produced by network devices, operating systems, applications, and other intelligent or programmable devices.

DESK Log Monitoring provides direct access to the log content of all your system's mission-critical processes and enables you to quickly search for specific log messages. You can filter log content based on keywords or analysis timeframe, and even analyze multiple log files simultaneously—even when log files are stored across multiple hosts.

Most significantly, DESK artificial intelligence automatically correlates relevant log messages with any problems that are detected in your environment. Any relevant log messages associated with a problem are factored into that problem's root-cause analysis.

Monitoring of data from services of the same type and the same process group.

A merged service is a service that aggregates multiple web-request services of the same process group that perform identical functions across separate cluster nodes. Service merging is available only for web-request services that perform the same function within the same process group, and so are effectively identical from a performance-monitoring perspective. A merged service appears in DESK as a single service that contains all the data of all aggregated services.

Say you have an Apache web server with several virtual host definitions (for example, desk.com, desk.at, and desk.pl). From the Apache perspective, these are independent virtual hosts. Therefore DESK detects them as separate services. For your monitoring purposes however, you might want to view these services as a single merged service called DESK web page.

To take the guess work out of knowing which of your services are eligible for service merging, DESK automatically identifies mergeable services for you and displays them on the Merged service monitoring page (Settings > Server-side service monitoring > Merged service monitoring). Only services included in this list can be merged.

The proactive support for DESK Managed that automatically solves many common maintenance and support challenges for you. Mission Control's proactive support provides fully automated management capabilities that keep DESK Server secure, reliable, and up-to-date—all while saving you from administrative tasks like upgrades and troubleshooting.

A dedicated 24x7 support team proactively handles health checks, scaling verification, upgrades, and any troubleshooting when you run into problems. This includes:

• Analyzing hardware utilization and alerting you if you need more resources.
• Addressing problems or incompatibilities with your DESK Server—so you don’t need to track and react to system events.
• Optimizing your DESK Managed settings to ensure optimum performance and stability.
• Collecting the required log files for problem resolution.

See How does Mission Control pro-active support work? for more information.

A host (either a VMware virtual machine or an EC2 instance) that communicates with monitored hosts in your environment, but doesn't itself have DESK OneAgent installed on it. It's recommended that you install DESK OneAgent on all monitoring candidates to gain full visibility and complete monitoring capabilities.

In Smartscape, a candidate is visualized with dashed circles and a generic host icon. Candidates are shown linked to relevant data centers. Each monitoring candidate is also listed on the Hosts page, within the Unmonitored category.

Any inactive monitoring candidates (those that haven't communicated with a host for more than two hours) aren't included in Smartscape or listed on the Hosts page.

Includes all the dashboards, charts, reports, and other tools that DESK makes available for the analysis of your application or applications. A monitoring environment is analogous to an analysis server that provides all your DESK application-performance analysis functionality.

You can set up multiple monitoring environments to group related entities for discrete analysis. For example, you might set up one monitoring environment to monitor and analyze the performance of your production clusters. You might set up a second environment that's dedicated to the performance of your developers' machines and a third environment for your staging servers. How you segment your monitoring environments is entirely up to you.

There are a number of variables (or dimensions) that affect application performance—most notably, geographic region, OS, browser, connection type, and user action. These are the five dimensions that DESK uses to evaluate application health. Each subset of cohorts is subject to a unique set of these variables so DESK measures the health of and reports on each of these user subsets separately.

DESK OneAgent monitors the performance of the hosts in your application-deployment environment, along with all related processes. Based on your environment settings, DESK OneAgent enables detailed performance monitoring and real user monitoring of your applications and their services. Changes to your applications, as well as infrastructure and performance problems, are reported to DESK for performance monitoring.

DESK mobile app support for Android. Use the DESK Android Gradle plugin to set up user experience monitoring for your Android application project, which automatically adds OneAgent to your app and auto-instruments it without modifying the source code. OneAgent for Android lets you track visitors, actions, and PurePaths that are triggered by your Android app.

OneAgent for Android is synonymous with "Mobile agent" in AppMon. See Mobile UEM in AppMon documentation for details.

DESK's mobile app support for iOS, which lets you track user behavior on mobile web pages. OneAgent for iOS helps you identify mobile user experience problems before they affect your users. It also lets you receive business analytics data like the geographic distribution of your web page visitors and average session duration.

DESK lets you set up OneAgent for iOS with CocoaPods or Carthage, or you can set it up manually through DESK to enable UEM monitoring for iOS apps.

OneAgent for iOS is synonymous with "Mobile agent" in AppMon. See Mobile UEM in AppMon documentation for details.

"oneagentmon device" appears in your Windows system during DESK OneAgent installation. It's used by DESK for deep process monitoring. It works like a monitoring driver and allows DESK OneAgent to add its own library between the operating system and the processes it's monitoring.

A special device that appears in your Windows system during DESK OneAgent installation. It's indispensable for deep monitoring purposes, as it allows DESK OneAgent to add its own library between the system and the monitored processes.

A service detected on the calling side by DESK for which code-level visibility isn't available.

DESK can detect requests of opaque services and identify which processes they're processed by, but DESK can't monitor opaque services directly.

Evaluating traffic and load anomalies carries different assumptions than evaluating performance anomalies. DESK uses a range of measures and methodologies to identify performance anomalies that affect customer experience and therefore require your attention. However, traffic and load anomalies are based on daily, seasonal, and business-cycle related patterns driven by an application's business model, related marketing efforts, and sociological factors. These are fairly predictable cycles that impact traffic and load as customers use your application. Examples of predictable cycles include weekends/workweeks, workday/evening hours, and customer activity occurring on an annual cycle, such as Black Friday. Because of this, DESK uses a prediction-based methodology approach to detect abnormalities in application traffic and service load.

A logical grouping of information in DESK that includes the AI-driven analysis, environmental context, root cause analysis, and other details provided for one or more incidents in your environment. Problems can express themselves in your environment as performance degradations, improper functionality, or lack of availability. A problem can be the result of a single "event" or multiple events.

A process is an instance of an executed computer program. Processes serve as containers that host services. When you look at processes you see topology information, whereas services give you code-level insight. For example, you might have a Tomcat process that hosts a web application in the form of a server-side service. While processes are host-centric—associated with a single machine in your environment—services are request-centric and therefore typically span across multiple machines in a data center.

A set of processes that perform the same function across multiple hosts. For example, you might have a cluster of servers with each server running the same process in support of multiple hosts.

An assessment of process health based on response-time metrics that measure how long it takes to react to requests from other processes or clients (regardless of resource consumption).

Real user monitoring analyzes the experience that your customers have while interacting with your application. Real user monitoring is a combination of web analytics and performance measurements that build a picture of how well your customer-facing components perform.

The time it takes for a service to execute and complete a task.

The DESK AI-driven process for understanding why detected problems occurred, along with guidance for resolving the underlying causes of problems.

DESK identifies performance problems before your customers are affected by them and prioritizes problems based on customer impact, providing instant insight into problem severity and user experience impact. When DESK discovers performance problems, it provides you with a single problem notification that identifies the root cause of the problem so you don’t have to manually interpret dozens of data sources to figure out what needs to be fixed.

Because performance problems are seldom isolated events (they're usually symptoms of larger issues), DESK artificial intelligence can analyze up to billions of events that occur within your IT environment to help you address the causes of problems, not the symptoms. DESK root cause analysis also streamlines bug fixing through deep-dive analysis into source code and database statements, letting you cut down mean time to repair by 90% or more.

Web and mobile applications are built upon services that process requests like web requests, web service calls, and messaging. For example, the web requests that are sent to a specific Tomcat server are an example of a server-side service. Such services can take the form of web services, web containers, database requests, custom services, and more. Services may in turn call other services such as web services, remote services, and databases services.

Processes are essentially containers that host services. When you look at processes you are looking at topology information, whereas services can provide code-level insights. For example, you might have a Tomcat process that hosts a web application in the form of a server-side service. While processes are host-centric—associated with a single machine in your environment—services are request-centric and therefore typically span across multiple machines in a data center.

Server-side code executed within a process group.

A visualization of all the services that send requests to a specific back-end service. More than just showing which services directly call a specific back-end service, Service backtrace shows you the sequence of service calls that leads up to each request, all the way back up to the browser click that triggered the sequence of calls.

An easy-to-read report that summarizes the monitoring insights that DESK has compiled over the past week. Service quality reports are structured in such a way that even non-technical team members can understand them. Reports calculate how well your monitored components perform and provides scores for the following areas:

• Overall environment
• Applications
• Services
• Infrastructure

Service quality reports give you insights into hot spots in your environment and make it easy to share insights with others.

Using proprietary Smartscape technology, DESK is able to automatically discover your entire application stack, from the data centers, hosts, and processes that comprise your infrastructure and network, through the services that comprise your applications, and extending all the way up to your applications. DESK even discovers and maps all of the dependencies of these components, in real time. DESK then presents its findings to you in an interactive Smartscape topology map. You can click anywhere within a Smartscape visualization to view performance statistics for each discovered entity in your environment.

The equivalent of a simulated user action. When a Browser clickpath triggers the loading of a new page or an XHR request, DESK monitors the availability and performance of that action.

Application availability and performance can be experienced differently by different customers around the world at any given time. DESK Synthetic monitoring makes it easy for you to monitor application availability and performance as your customers experience it, around the world and around the clock. Synthetic monitoring proactively simulates user visits even when no users are currently visiting your site. Synthetic monitoring provides 24x7 global visibility into your web applications by driving real web browser sessions with full HTML5/Ajax support.

The analysis timeframe selection tool that's in the upper-right corner of all DESK pages and views. The timeframe selector enables you to filter monitoring data down to a specific time range. Previous and Next buttons enable you to move forward and backward in time based on pre-defined increments (30 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, etc.). Selected timeframes remain persistent even when you move between pages and views.

Actions your customers perform within your application. User actions equate to common user activities such as performing a search, viewing an account balance, viewing items in a shopping cart, or ordering a product. User actions vary based on the features of your application.

From the DESK perspective, each user action contains all client activity that occurs during the transition from one state to another. Each user action contains at least one web request because when a user navigates to a page, the browser downloads multiple resources and calls the JavaScript onload handler, which in turn may perform XHR requests and more.

The duration of a user action is called action duration. This represents the time that the user must wait before they can proceed. So a low action duration is better than a high action duration. For more details, see What are user actions?.

One or more user actions that comprise an interaction between a user’s browser and your application. User sessions (aka, "user visits") end when the user’s browser closes or is inactive for 30 minutes. Note that bounced sessions (sessions with only a single action) don't count against your licensed session quota.

DESK typically shows all the sessions of each individual user, even when those sessions are anonymous (non-authenticated users identified with browser cookies) or when a user tag has been edited or deleted. For mobile apps, DESK identifies individual users based on the specific mobile device they use. For web applications, user identification is achieved by storing a persistent cookie within each user’s browser. Cookies enable DESK to assign even anonymous user sessions to known users. As long as a user has logged into your application at least once, you can search for and identify that user, even when the user accesses your application within anonymous, unauthenticated sessions. This is particularly useful for analyzing periods of time when a user may not have been able to log into your application due to an issue with your authentication service.