EG Enterprise v7 focuses on usability, user experience monitoring

Software vendor EG Innovations will release version 7 of its EG Enterprise software, its end-user experience monitoring tool, on Jan. 31.

New features and updates have been added to the IT monitoring software with the goal of making it more user-friendly. The software focuses primarily on monitoring end-user activities and responses.

"Many times, vendor tools monitor their own software stack but do not go end to end," said Srinivas Ramanathan, CEO of EG Innovations. "Cross-tier, multi-vendor visibility is critical when it comes to monitoring and diagnosing user experience issues. After all, users care about the entire service, which cuts across vendor stacks."

Ramanathan said IT issues are not as simple as they used to be.

"What you will see in 2020 is now that there is an ability to provide more intelligence to user experience, how do you put that into use?" said Mark Bowker, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "EG has a challenge of when to engage with a customer. IT's a value to them if they engage with the customer sooner in an end-user kind of monitoring scenario. In many cases, they get brought in to solve a problem when it's already happened, and it would be better for them to shift."

New features in EG Enterprise v7 include:

• Synthetic and real user experience monitoring: Users can create simulations and scripts of different applications that can be replayed to further help diagnose a problem and notifies IT operations teams of impending problems.
• Layered monitoring: Enables users to monitor every tier of an application stack via a central console.
• Automated diagnosis: Lets users use machine learning and automation to find root causes to issues.
• Optimization plan: Users can customize optimization plans through capacity and application overview reports.

"Most people look at user experience as just response time for accessing any application. We see user experience as being broader than this," Ramanthan said. "If problems are not diagnosed correctly and they reoccur again and again, it will hurt user experience. If the time to resolve a problem is high, users will be unhappy."

Pricing for EG Enterprise v7 begins at $2 per user per month in a digital workspace. Licensing for other workloads depends on how many operating systems are being monitored. The new version includes support for Citrix and VMWare Horizon.