9.1 About End User Monitoring

End User Monitoring is a utility that is part of Oracle Enterprise Manager. It allows developers and administrators to monitor the performance of their applications. Since there is minimal overhead in terms of system resources when reporting live data, a system administrator is able to accurately monitor the performance of live applications without needing to take any special additional steps.

End User Monitoring includes reports and performance charts, along with system generated alerts. Unlike existing monitoring mechanisms within Forms, End User Monitoring records the delay experienced by the user from their computer, and not just the processing time inside the Oracle Forms Runtime Process.

The data that is reported from End User Monitoring is qualitative. It can be used for trend analysis, reports comparing different domains or user groups. For example, if opening a particular form is normally reported as taking 2 seconds, and this suddenly drops to 10 seconds, then it is reasonable to expect a corresponding degradation as experienced by users. It does not mean that a user sitting with a stopwatch would record exactly 10 seconds for the operation. Similarly, if a particular query normally reports a database time of 3 seconds, and that query time suddenly jumps to 30 seconds, then a similar performance degradation will be experienced by users.

It's also important to realize that End User Monitoring is not a debugging tool. Analyzing the data will help identify what areas to investigate further, but it will not in itself identify the cause.